The rest of us can carry on having a good time.
This week, readers of the left-wing publication The Nation were treated to a spirited debate between two of its authors around the following proposition: Is Thanksgiving such an irredeemable display of noxious American jingoism that it should be abandoned altogether and replaced with an agonizing struggle session the magazine has decided to call “Truthsgiving”?
Writer and activist Sean Sherman declined to endorse the proposal, but he was not so quick to dismiss the charge that Thanksgiving itself constitutes a celebration of America’s sins. It may be a forgivable moral lapse, though, because “aliens in a foreign land need to invent new myths and identities to provide themselves with a sense of people, purpose, and place.” The descendants of the New World settlers won’t disappear tomorrow, unfortunate though that may be, so those myths retain some value. But the original colonists are undeserving of our gratitude. “You want to give thanks?” Sherman asked. “Give thanks to Native nations who granted settlers some form of legitimacy—by entering into treaties recognizing them—to be in our homelands.”
Chase Iron Eyes, a Nation contributor, wanted nothing to do with this exercise in needle threading. Speaking as “a proud member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota,” Iron Eyes subscribes to the view that Thanksgiving is a celebration of “colonialism, violence, and misrepresentation.” If the holiday isn’t done away with entirely, we should “decolonize it.” Americans should spend the day steeping themselves in guilt and solemnly atoning for the sins of their forefathers with the understanding that true absolution is available only to those who contribute healthy portions of their incomes to a variety of progressive projects.
This may read like a rote example of the self-flagellation to which progressives submit themselves every year, but there is a philosophy behind it. I explored it in some detail in my last book, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back against Progressives’ War on Fun.
Progressivism, which rose from the ashes of the Puritan experiment in Mainline Protestant New England, retains some vestigial totalitarian traits — as you would expect from a holistic worldview that maintains that all of society’s oars must row in the same direction. The original Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries were hostile to holidays because observing them encouraged what Cotton Mather deemed “licentious liberty.” They distract from the great labors of our time by promoting “mad mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming.” The New Puritans object to holidays on roughly the same grounds, which is why they so routinely try to mute the enjoyment you partake in them.
That’s why the Christmas season is adulterated with so many primers from progressive publications exhorting the true believers in their flock to descend on their relatives and lecture them about their moral and political failings. That’s why Halloween cannot be a carefree evening surrounded by costumed kids and candy. It is a day that “requires thinking not just about stereotypes or discrimination but also about white supremacy,” according to the Washington Post’s Osamudia James. And it’s why Thanksgiving, in particular, deserves to be anathematized:
Conceptually, there isn’t much about Thanksgiving that puritanically inclined progressives would look upon fondly. It celebrates the establishment of the Mayflower Compact and the Plymouth Colony organized around it. That foothold in the New World would not have been possible without the aid of the local Native American tribes, who were subsequently displaced (albeit with a lot of intervening history of conflict, diplomacy, and intertribal politics). It is also the forerunner to both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two events that celebrate unadulterated consumerism. It was formally established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to commemorate what were at the time the Union’s few and far between victories in the Civil War, forever coupling it with reverence for the Republic and its Constitution. If you find more to criticize than celebrate in the above, you’re probably not going to see Thanksgiving as an absolute good.
“Thanksgiving Day should be known as National Land Theft and American Genocide Day,” Huffington Post contributor Nicole Breedlove cheerfully submitted. She contended that the holiday’s roots are embedded in soil soaked through with Pequot blood. Only after the 1637 massacre of one of this tribe’s villages did American colonists begin to even think about providence or gratitude, Breedlove contended. “So when you sit down to dinner this year,” she concluded, “think about the countless Native Americans who lost their lives so you can carve a turkey and get the best deals on Black Friday.”
The folk history of this holiday that children are (or rather, were) taught in elementary school is “socially irresponsible,” the teachers’ resource Learning for Justice advised. They recommend educators teach Thanksgiving as a “National Day of Mourning,” citing a recommendation in a 1970 speech by the Native American activist Wamsutta Frank James. The lesson planners at ArtsAndJustice.org suggest renaming it “ThanksTaking.”
And if all that is just too much, you could do away with the holiday entirely. “One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting,” University of Texas at Austin professor Robert Jensen declared.
That doesn’t sound like a ton of fun. But then, if we’re dedicating ourselves to the pursuit of “moral progress,” fun is not the goal.
The fact that no one outside the progressive tribe seems inclined to listen to these overwrought admonitions doesn’t seem to bother the admonishers. Indeed, the progressives doing the hectoring appear to take pride in their isolation. There is satisfaction enough in making a dramatic display of their bottomless capacity for joylessness. In that sense, at least, the activist Left has found a leisure activity they enjoy, even if it is only trying to deprive the rest of us of a good time.