Thanksgiving began as an austere occasion among settlers of a single, uniform faith who were grateful simply for having survived in the New World. The observance was revived later in time of war, a reminder to everyone about the nation’s good fortune even in its worst crises. Today it’s a little harder to summon that public and universal spirit. The country has people of many faiths, opinions and degrees of unbelief. It is the richest and most powerful nation on Earth. For it to give thanks to some greater power for benefits bestowed upon it (and upon none other) seems a bit presumptuous and perhaps excessive, as if the New England Patriots were to point skyward and thank divine providence for their eighth touchdown of a game. The president’s focus on thanking those who serve is a worthwhile common theme. There is another “thank you” on which Americans can unite. “The chances of birth favored the new Americans,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the nation nearly two centuries ago. “[T]heir fathers of old brought to the land in which they live that equality both of conditions and of mental endowments from which, as from its natural source, a democratic republic was one day to arise. But that is not all; with a republican social state they bequeathed to their descendants the habits, ideas, and mores best fitted to make a republic flourish.”
