Thanksgiving is upon us once again, and the left is doing its usual thing. Search around the nation’s foremost leftist publications, and you’ll find the holiday ignored altogether, referred to in passing as the day that Trump’s presidency will finally crash and burn, or radically revised so that it’s really all about the coming victory of the oppressed and marginalized. You will likely search in vain for any leftist anywhere actually doing what the holiday invites us to do: give thanks. There is a very simple reason for this glaring omission: an attitude of gratitude runs contrary to what leftism in all its forms is all about. In fact, being grateful is the very condition that the left wants most to eradicate from the earth altogether.
That most venerable of far-left rags, The Nation, led the way with a hitherto unnoticed reason for why all decent people should abhor Thanksgiving Day. It seems that (as per the title of one article) “The Pilgrims Were Doomsday Cultists.” That’s right, and they were proto-MAGA fascists, too: “The settlers who arrived in Plymouth were not escaping religious persecution. They left on the Mayflower to establish a theocracy in the Americas.” You know, just like those “Christian nationalists” who want to replace the U.S. Constitution with the Bible, the ones whom the left is always so eager to warn about them, but who are actually so thin on the ground.
And so what we need to do, The Nation tells us, is “Make Thanksgiving Radical Again.” As it turns out, you see, “the holiday’s real roots lie in abolition, liberation, and anti-racism. Let’s reconnect to that legacy.”
Uh huh. Actually, this isn’t difficult, and there is no need to overcomplicate it. The real roots of a holiday called “Thanksgiving” lie in giving thanks. But that is a posture that the left rejects utterly. Leftism in all its forms, from whatever the ideology of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer is to outright Maoism, is about a forthright and unapologetic rejection of the impulse to be grateful for anything.
As PJM’s C. A. Skeet explained Tuesday, “resentful, bitter people will never be thankful for anything. And they’re downright offended that we celebrate this holiday, the entire purpose of which is to humbly express gratitude for what we have been given. It flies in the face of their entire worldview.” Indeed. Leftism is the politics of rejecting being grateful.
Consider, for example, the left’s oft-repeated promise that they will “make the rich pay their fair share” in taxes. The unspoken assumption is that they aren’t doing so already, and that the non-rich have a right to confiscate their wealth, which is assumed to be ill-gotten. New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and his fellow “democratic socialists” like to rail against “billionaires,” portraying them as a shadowy gang of plutocrats intent on bleeding ordinary folks dry.
“A handful of millionaires and billionaires insolently dominate and the entire nation is in bondage,” said a prominent leftist. It could have been Mamdani or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders, but it was actually V. I. Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union. Leftism from its mild to its virulent forms is essentially the same. We have to envy and hate the rich. We have to give them a taste of their own medicine, and bleed them dry instead. That’s socialism, that’s leftism, that’s the politics of envy and hatred. And the envious and hateful are by definition not grateful.
Related: It’s Not Pride Month, It’s Envy Month
And so the left, ungrateful in its very nature and at the core of its being, must try to remake Thanksgiving in its own image. It’s not really about giving thanks, you see. The people who first set aside a day to give thanks were dangerous religious fanatics, and even “doomsday cultists” (and this from people who constantly side with and make excuses for the real doomsday cultists who run the Islamic Republic of Iran). It’s really about “abolition, liberation, and anti-racism,” which is the left’s way of saying that it’s about harnessing the power of resentment in order to gain and hold political power.
That’s why the left hates Thanksgiving, and why leftists can and will never do anything but hate Thanksgiving and try to eradicate it. It’s all an exercise in white supremacism and settler colonialism, anyway. But above all, it must be destroyed because it encourages people to do what absolutely kills the entire leftist enterprise: give thanks.
