My case is simple: Thanksgiving is about gratitude, and gratitude is central to what it means to be a conservative. It is the profound appreciation for what has come before us, what millions of people who never knew us did to make our lives immeasurably better.
Conservatives stand in awe of Western civilization, the American Founding, enumerated rights, our constitutional order of limited government, the rule of law, racial and ethnic equality, a sturdy national defense, free markets and the extraordinary wealth they have produced — incredible things that most people in human history did not experience. In fact, most people who are alive today do not experience them. We had no hand in making them, but, by the fortune of our birth and circumstances, we get to enjoy their wonderful fruits. This realization imbues us with a sense of responsibility to preserve these fragile cornerstones for the generations that follow — to be careful, whenever we embark on reform, not to sacrifice the tremendous gains our forefathers already made.
Many conservatives I respect a great deal have already made this point. Their words are worth reading again on Thanksgiving.
The great Yuval Levin in a 2013 speech:
To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.
You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed. We should never forget that the people who oppose our various endeavors and argue for another way are well intentioned, too, even when they’re wrong, and that they’re not always wrong.
But we can also never forget what moves us to gratitude, what we stand for and defend: the extraordinary cultural inheritance we have; the amazing country built for us by others and defended by our best and bravest; America’s unmatched potential for lifting the poor and the weak; the legacy of freedom — of ordered liberty — built up over centuries of hard work.
We value these things not because they are triumphant and invincible but because they are precious and vulnerable; because they weren’t fated to happen, and they’re not certain to survive. They need us — and our gratitude for them should move us to defend them and to build on them.
Ben Sasse, the former senator from Nebraska, in a hidden footnote to his 2018 book, Them:
Conservatism, in my view, begins with an understanding of the world as a broken place always at risk of spinning out of control. A conservative, then, is pleasantly surprised to find so much good in the world. He or she responds in profound gratitude for the gifts we’ve received and consequently aims to conserve or preserve those blessings, and to steward an order under which those blessings might be shared with even more people, all of whom are possessed of inexhaustible dignity and inalienable rights. Conservatism is, therefore, antithetical to an attitude that says to “burn it all down.” Because conservatism is in part a disposition of gratitude, it is opposed to a culture of grievance or universal victimhood.
Finally, with perhaps the best expression of the gut conservative feeling of gratitude, NR’s own Charles C. W. Cooke in 2023:
Look around you. Look at the machine you’re reading this on. Look at the language in which this post is written. Look at your thermostat. Do you have a chair to sit on? That’s all pretty nice, isn’t it? Glance out of the window. Does it look peaceful, stable, prosperous? Other people did that. They wrote the laws and fought the wars and built the roads and did all manner of terrible jobs, and you inherited all of it with no effort whatsoever on your part. I find it difficult to contain my gratitude for this. Long before I was around, people died on battlefields and toiled in laboratories and argued about constitutions so that, one day, I would be able to pour myself a glass of wine and turn on the NFL without worrying that a barbarian in a Viking helmet might barge through the gate and amble to my door. In all honesty, I did nothing to deserve this. One day, I just woke up, and there it all was.
I don’t know you, of course. Perhaps you’re rich. Perhaps you’re poor. Perhaps you’re a Republican. Perhaps you’re a Democrat. If you’re especially downtrodden, you may even be a Boston Red Sox fan. But whatever you are, if you’re in the United States, you’re a victor. Like me, you have it better than almost every person who has ever drawn breath. You have the First Amendment, and Tylenol, and air travel, and the internet, and supermarkets, and movie theaters, and indoor plumbing, and rollercoasters, and the music of Ella Fitzgerald. You live in a country with 50 varied and fascinating states, any of which you can choose to live in at a moment’s notice. You have sunshine, and mountains, and rivers, and snow, and the beach, and wide-open spaces to enjoy — and yet, unlike most of your forebears, you’re not captive to them. That’s nice, right?
It ought to be, anyway. At the very least, it ought to be sufficient to give you something for which to say “thank you” on Thursday. It wasn’t always like this, you know. We’d notice if it all went away.
We would, indeed. But it is the conservative’s job to make sure it doesn’t all go away, even as human nature perpetually tries to pull us back to killing each other with sticks in the forest. The man-made structures of civilization are really all that stand in the way.
Gratitude for what we have inherited is what motivates our suspicion of grand experiments, our refusal to rearrange society wholesale, our stalwart defense of the ideas and institutions that undergird a free and ordered society. It is what drives us to conserve. Thanksgiving is just the annual reminder of our duties — a uniquely American nudge toward gratitude for a people who have more to be grateful for than any other who ever lived.