The Radicalism of Thanksgiving

W hile most Americans, in their antiquated parochialism, still gather to celebrate Thanksgiving with beloved friends and family, the progressive climate activists over at the Sunrise Movement are of a considerably more enlightened disposition. They know better: The fourth Thursday of November isn’t a moment to embark on a brisk Turkey Day trot, convene in the living room for football, or eat a couple of belt notches’ worth of gravy and stuffing. It’s the Indigenous Day of Mourning.

The push to establish an “Indigenous Day of Mourning” in place of the traditional American Thanksgiving is of a piece with a broader, coordinated cultural project, which had begun decades ago in universities, later spilling out into our mainstream institutions, and accelerating on the heels of the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020. It is the same project that has successfully replaced Columbus Day with “Indigenous People’s Day” across the country, with at least 100 American cities and numerous states discarding the Italian explorer for a celebration of “Indigenous contributions” in his stead. The toppling of statues of American heroes, the flying of Black Lives Matter and LGBT-themed flags from the U.S. embassies, “inclusive curricula” that teach Aztec worship and indigenous chants in place of the Constitution and The Federalist Papers, and the attempt to substitute 1619 for 1776 as the date of the nation’s founding, are all fruits of the same effort to turn American identity on its head.

Advocates of this systemic revision understand, often more keenly than their ideological opponents, the power of national symbols, stories, and traditions in shaping a people’s identity. The term “radical” is derived from the Latin radix — “root.” Today’s radicals know that the success of their political project requires an attack on the traditions, figures, and mythos that root the American people to their nation. To transform a society, one must transform the way it understands itself; and doing so itself requires uprooting the stubborn old patriotic attachments that stand in the way of utopia.

So it is with the newly energized assault on Thanksgiving. The American festival of gratitude, celebrated as a federal holiday since 1863, was codified by Abraham Lincoln in the midst of a bloody civil war. But that “civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity,” Lincoln reminded his fellow citizens in his presidential proclamation, had not eclipsed the blessings bestowed upon Americans by “the ever watchful providence of Almighty God”:

Peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

The horrors of the Civil War, Lincoln understood, were not a repudiation of America as such. They were a reflection of the brokenness of human nature — a constant feature of our fallen world, from which America was not immune. That violence, bloodshed, and suffering existed here, too, was a function of the fact that men were not angels. Americans had built their country from the same, crooked timber of humanity. But it was the best humanity had mustered in the long, blood-soaked history of the race. America was capable of becoming what generations past would have considered impossible. It was worthy of pride; it was worth fighting for.

Contrast that with the edicts of Thanksgiving’s contemporary critics. “Today is Thanksgiving Day, and it is also the National Day of Mourning, which remembers the genocide of millions of Native Americans and their ongoing erasure today,” progressive radio host Qasim Rashid intoned, urging his followers to “reflect and act to stop the ongoing genocide of America’s Indigenous Peoples.” Simon Moya-Smith, a left-wing journalist, maintained that today’s “National Day of Mourning for Indigenous peoples all across this land” — also referred to as “Un-thanksgiving,” he added — was a day for “Natives [to] celebrate our resiliency & that we are still here. The U.S. tried to kill every Indigenous man, woman, and child. . . . But we’re still here.” Business Insider argued that the National Day of Mourning was a moment for “members of the Indigenous community” to “reflect on their heritage and educate the masses about how their ancestors were slaughtered by foreigners who first arrived in the United States in the 1600s.” Interviewing an indigenous activist, BBC wrote: “For her, the day is a painful reminder of an ugly chapter in American history; a symbol of empty promises, a story whose retelling tends to gloss over the undesirable details of colonisation.” And “amid a racial reckoning,” Axios reported, “Thanksgiving, where Indigenous people are the center of a national myth, is also a target.”

That much is clear. And America’s annual giving of thanks is not the only target, either. Those who have the common sense to shroud their radicalism in moderate terms maintain that these efforts are merely attempts to “live up to” America’s founding ideals, rather than to lay waste to the fertile ground that allowed them to flourish: As President Biden argued in last year’s presidential proclamation, officially commemorating Indigenous People’s Day, “Our country was conceived on a promise of equality and opportunity for all people — a promise that, despite the extraordinary progress we have made through the years, we have never fully lived up to.” But, to the extent to which our octogenarian chief executive understands anything about America’s “conception” at all, it is little more than a twisted misapprehension of a single line about all men being created equal, abstracted from and twisted beyond anything that the Declaration of Independence’s signatories would ever recognize. Every other traditional cornerstone of the American political tradition — constitutional limits on federal power, republican virtue, religious liberty, a respect for the traditional family and the communal mores that safeguard it, and the Christian underpinnings of the “moral and religious people” that John Adams astutely observed our Constitution was made for — goes the way of the dodo.

The true meaning of the “Indigenous Day of Mourning,” then, is painfully obvious: It is the latest in an onslaught of attempts to replace gratitude with self-hatred, orchestrated via the successive hollowing out of the traditions that have made our nation powerful, prosperous, and free. Just as a racialized, leveling “equity” vies to transplant a much more restrained and deferential “equality,” or a majoritarian “democracy” demands to take the place of self-governing republicanism, days of mourning seek to take the place of the giving of thanks.

That is the counterrevolutionary power of Thanksgiving: It is an expression of a stubborn pride — an attachment to an America that many in the nation’s governing institutions would like to leave behind. So long as millions of Americans gather every year to affirm the greatness of our people, our history, and our achievements, the holiday will serve as “a stumbling block to all those who, in after time, might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.” Happy Thanksgiving.