By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, November 27, 2024
It’s the day—more specifically, the very early
morning—before Thanksgiving. I’m in New York City with my daughter for some
quality time. Or I was. Now I’m in New York with one goal in mind: Getting out
of it with my kid and my luggage intact on one of the worst travel days of the
year.
That’s why I’m not really writing a full-fledged G-File.
Then again, full-fledged is redundant. To be fledged is to be fully fledged.
But that’s not important right now.
I just wanted to talk to you a little about gratitude,
Thanksgiving, conservatism, and The Dispatch.
I had Yuval Levin on The Remnant
this week to talk about gratitude. I associate Yuval with gratitude, and not
just because he was so generous with his prison toilet wine back in the day. I
think of conservatism as an expression of gratitude, and I credit Yuval with
injecting that idea into my cabeza. I think I always believed it to one
extent or another. But Yuval’s articulation of it a decade ago crystalized
the idea for me:
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.
This basic idea is the TL;DR of my book Suicide of the
West. It’s also one of the reasons we launched The Dispatch. We
wanted to defend what we believe to be good and what works and build on it, at
a time when fellow conservatives were behaving like liberals, full of
outrage against the system.
Thanksgiving also plays a central role in the founding of
The Dispatch. When we were pitching the idea, I used to talk about how
there was a market for something to deal with the Thanksgiving problem. At
Thanksgiving dinner you often have to deal with your cranky right-wing uncle or
crazy left-wing aunt. We wanted to create something that has some credibility
with both camps. If your Marxist aunt insists that Republicans want to drill
for oil in the Vatican, using kittens for drill bits, and you say, “That’s not
true Aunt Ethel,” and send her a Fox News article proving it, she’ll say “I
don’t believe Fox.” If you tell your super-MAGA uncle that in fact Joe Biden
has not been replaced by an animatronic robot from Disney’s Hall of Presidents,
he’ll say, “prove it.” But if you send him an article from the New York
Times to do just that, he’ll snort “fake news.”
We wanted to create something that had at least some
credibility with the aunts and uncles. Steve and I were both Fox News
contributors, one from National Review, the other from The Weekly
Standard, but neither of us was interested in carrying water for the GOP or
Donald Trump. Maybe that earned us a little benefit of the doubt on either
side.
I’m sure we have plenty of work to do with specific aunts
and uncles, but broadly speaking I think we’ve done a good job on that
front.
Anyway, if you’ve read me much over the years, you know my
view
of
Thanksgiving.
It’s my favorite holiday in part because it’s the most immune to politics and
modernity. What I mean is that it successfully fends off not just ideological
and partisan corruption, but materialistic seduction as well. For most of us,
it’s about the little platoon, the microcosm, and little else. It’s about home.
There’s a reason most Thanksgiving movies are about going home, getting home,
being home.
As I make my way home, I just wanted to give some thanks
to all of you for being part of my new professional and political home these
last five years. I’m grateful for all of you—well, almost all of you.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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