The Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Thanksgiving is the most universal of American holidays. It either transcends or embraces religion, whichever you choose. It brings family together. It invites reflection on the nobility of gratitude. What’s more, in election years, after the people raise their voices to determine how they are to be governed, the celebration can contain an offering of thanks for the precious right of democracy.

                Not quite so this year. Family gatherings have been impeded by a pandemic much worse than it need be. Unbridled pride in the power of the vote has been stolen by invented charges of fraud, a fabrication that has taken root like a malignancy among millions of Americans. President Trump has grouchily damaged America’s faith in its democratic birthright.

This should be a moment of thanksgiving for the system that held the line against a president’s assaults. We should be buoyed by the poll workers, vote counters, election boards, courts, and local officials who maintained a bulwark of honesty against the Republican assaults on the vote. As Tom Friedman wrote today, “It was their collective integrity, their willingness to stand with ‘Team America,’ not either party, that protected our democracy when it was facing one of its greatest threats — from within. History will remember them fondly.”

Yet Trump allows us no delight in our achievement. He drains our pleasure in seeing more citizens vote than ever before. He makes it hard for us to congratulate ourselves for running a free and efficient election amid a devastating pandemic. He doesn’t even permit a bow by his own Department of Homeland Security for repelling foreign hackers and domestic manipulators. He seeds the electorate with cynicism and will surely fertilize that weed of faithlessness in the coming years.

It is way past time to have stopped listening to him. It is time instead to absorb the civics lesson we’ve just received--in the critical roles of the foot-soldiers of democracy, in the key responsibilities placed on secretaries of state and other officials hitherto unknown, and in the virtue of the federal system’s ingenious dispersal of political power from the center down to the states and counties and municipalities. Rigging an election would require rigging multitudes of elections. That’s one beauty of a decentralized structure that can stay the hand of an autocrat in Washington.

Dr. Seuss’s Grinch had a softening of heart at the end of the story of his stealing Christmas. Don’t expect that in Donald Trump. The best answer to him lies in the hearts of Americans, if on Thanksgiving Day enough of us raise a glass in tribute to the great American treasure of democracy, which has survived, at least for a time.