Hey,
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 If you tell your super-MAGA uncle that in fact Joe Biden has not been replaced by an animatronic robot from Disney’s Hall of Presidents, he’ll say, “prove it.”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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