As Thanksgiving approaches on this election year, many of us can’t help but think of politics. We may feel grateful for the election outcome. Or it may seem that there is nothing this year to feel thankful for.
We may wonder how we are going to stand that uncle (or that niece) who parrots the other party’s talking points. Sadly, politically mixed families have canceled or cut short their Thanksgiving dinners in recent years after contentious elections. A 2016 study tracked cell-phone location data to reveal that cross-party gatherings became 30 to 50 minutes shorter than same-party gatherings
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Many of us worry more broadly about the decline in our American political culture of dialogue across differences, for which “the first Thanksgiving” at Plymouth Rock often has served as an origin story. This election, politicians called the opposing party “the enemy” and promised retribution rather than bipartisan collaboration. Recent Congresses have featured legislative gridlock rather than “reaching across the aisle.” Studies find that red and blue voters increasingly avoid any interaction with each other—even on dating sites.
The pundits explain this polarization in terms of “political tribalism.” Campaigns like “Make America Great Again” traffic in images of past generations as a simpler and better society. This populist rhetoric stirs feelings of nostalgia, loss, and anger. It taps into a central current in our evolved psychology, the instinct to maintain the traditions of our tribe against outside influences. It’s an age-old playbook to stoke this traditionalism to divide. It sets the stage for blaming problems on new immigrants and identity groups and for policies that suppress them.
However, this doesn’t mean that our tribal psychology is a curse that ineluctably dooms our democracy. Many political leaders throughout history have stirred the nostalgia and obligation felt toward ancestors to unify rather than divide. The revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi inspired the fractious kingdoms of the Italian peninsula to merge as a nation by reminding them of a glorious precedent, the Roman Republic. Winston Churchill mobilized Britons of different classes and regions to fight together through speeches that alluded to valorous British ancestors like Henry V.
You may have learned in school, like I did, that Thanksgiving Day is an unbroken American tradition since the Pilgrims held their dinner in 1621. But, in fact, these Puritans called that feast a “rejoicing” rather than a “thanksgiving,” which meant a prayer ceremony. Harvest feasts were held occasionally in colonial New England. So were the more solemn thanksgiving ceremonies, and George Washington held one after the Revolutionary War. But it was not until about 250 years after Plymouth Rock that a national Thanksgiving holiday was introduced.
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In 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected carrying less than 40% of the electorate. Seven Southern states seceded before his inauguration. Soon after, the Civil War commenced and more states left. That political crisis was far deeper than the one we face today. Worse yet, Lincoln was an unpolished frontiersman unprepared for challenge he faced.
Or was he? His first inaugural delivered a cryptic promise: “The mystic chords of memory…will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” The collective past and our powerful feelings about it could be the key to healing the riven nation. In 1863, shortly before referencing the founding fathers in his more famous Gettysburg Address, Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation asking Americans to set aside the last Thursday of November as a national holiday of remembrance and gratitude.
As a lawyer, Lincoln understood the power of precedents, so he referenced the Providentialism of the Pilgrims and echoed the timing of George Washington’s one-time ceremony. The “Log Cabin Sage” understood his power as a narrator in chief—not just the custodian of collective memory, but its curator and creator.
Traumatized by civil war, draft riots, and epidemics, the public took to this reassuring autumn routine of turkeys, cranberries, and pumpkin pie. Americans could picture all their compatriots—Northern or Southern, in Eastern cities or Western towns—tucking into this same meal on the same day, an “imagined community” of the nation. And they could believe that their ancestors on these shores had done so from the start. It became an institution and soon a sacred tradition. Today Thanksgiving still moves us deeply, casting a traditionalist spell of nostalgia, belonging, and obligation.
In every country, the national folklore is partly fakelore. Political leaders introduce new policies to solve problems of their day but frame them as continuations of long-established precedents. This “invention of tradition” garners legitimacy, the reverence and obligation that people feel toward the ways of their ancestors. Traditionalism may be a conservative impulse, but it can be harnessed in service of many political agendas by finding precedents for a plan forward.
Just as the new holiday of remembrance and gratitude helped to reunite the country after the Civil War, Thanksgiving can also work to redress our rifts today—in our polarized nation and even in our families. By serving the same side-dishes and pies, by cheering on usual parade or football game or turkey trot, and by reminiscing about holidays past and elders departed, we can feel at a visceral level the sense of meaning and purpose that recurrent rituals provide. We feel at one with the others gathered around the table and we feel connected also to the prior generations who came before us.
Granted, a day of giving thanks can seem a stretch to those pained by the year’s conflicts. But we should remember that this tradition was born at our nation’s darkest hour. It helped the country recover from a rift far deeper than our’s today. The Thanksgiving holiday, itself, is something to be thankful for.
And so is the deep human instinct that underlies such rituals. This human-specific wiring to perpetuate the ways of prior generations gave rise to the explosion of symbolic practices in late Stone Age humans. Ritual practices became a basis for the formation of broad networks of trust and cooperation—tribes–that helped them thrive. It can similarly carry us through the strains of the current political moment—so long as we once again harness this instinct for inclusiveness rather than divisiveness.
We need traditions and tribalism because we need each other. We always have.
Adapted from TRIBAL: How the Cultural Instincts that Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together (Penguin 2024). All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.