A wonderful column on America today. T

The Wall Street Journal

Opinion

Declarations

America Has Much to Be Thankful For

We are a great democratic republic, we have been through a lot, and we are still the hope of the world. 

By Peggy Noonan

Nov. 27, 2024 6:35 pm ET

By the time Donald Trump is inaugurated president on Jan. 20, 2025, a lot of people will think he’s already been president for a year. All eyes, every day, have been on Mar-a-Lago, from which have come a constant barrage of appointments, some good, some half-mad, a few promising electrifying confirmation hearings. But that is a future story.

What am I grateful for now? I’ve felt the past few weeks how I often feel after reading the history of a war: “Well, we got through that.” We got through a contentious brawl of an election in one piece. The result was accepted by all. We’re not fighting it out in court. You can say this only happened because Mr. Trump won—if he’d lost he’d be protesting and unleashing legal challenges—and that is surely true. But democracy is in part a matter of habit and expectation, and a nation full of kids and young people just saw us model, as in the old days, how to do it. You send in your ballot or line up at the polls and then they count the votes and declare the winner. The young, after this election, will more easily believe that it still works here. They’ll bring that feeling into the future, which will be good.

I am grateful to see the outcome was so peacefully received. That peace is not only exhaustion. Absorbing the big news has involved thoughtfulness and reflection, or so I have observed.

I am grateful we aren’t complacent, bored, and dying of ennui. We aren’t only stuck to our screens, we are a politically engaged nation. We go to rallies and sign petitions, cheer on political figures and invest in them through donations. We may have grown more decadent in our entertainments, but we haven’t checked out. Is that a small thing to be thankful for? Yes, and I’m thankful for it.

I continue to feel thankful we’re split but not shattered. We’re more or less a 50-50 nation, with two big parties that, however they fail us, and they do, most people find themselves able to fit themselves into. This speaks of a certain stability.

I am more thankful every day for the legal immigrants to America, the many, many millions who gained citizenship after standing in line and filling out papers and meeting the requirements. I think they’ve had a balancing effect on our politics. They came here to join a country that lived in their imaginations—truth, justice, and the American way. They have put all their chips on us. They don’t want us to become absurd, corrupt, unreliable like the nations they left. I just sense they’re more protective of us than we are of ourselves—they don’t want us to waste ourselves or be torn apart. Keep your pride and keep what’s good, all the freedoms we came for. Their children will be senators. They’re bringing a lot of love to the game.

I find myself grateful that while the national winners, the Republican Party, can fairly claim a mandate—carrying both houses of Congress and the popular vote, winning in the battleground states—it is still, yet, a modest one. The margins in Congress are real but not overwhelming, the battleground states were close, the popular vote at time of writing, with some votes still being counted, is 76,883,434 for Mr. Trump and 74,406,431 for Kamala Harris. There’s something touching and impressive in the specificity there, if you needed to be reminded that every vote counts. But what we’re looking at is a clear, close margin—49.96% to 48.35%. Even with an ultimately insufficient presidential candidate, the Democrats got almost half the votes. They’re not over, but they’re wobbling, and the things they stand for aren’t popular and don’t deserve to be.

Republicans are feeling good, and should, but the age of the 20th-century landslide is long gone; it’s always a close-run thing now.

If the Democrats continue to think their problem is one of communications only, they have more losses coming. They do have a communications problem—too many of them, certainly their activists, seem to be talking down to people. But their primary problem isn’t communications, it’s content. Most of my life, regular people on the street could describe what the Democratic Party stands for. They’re for the little guy, for generous spending, and, since the 1960s and up until the 9/11 era, were antiwar. All that territory has been stolen by the Republican Party of Donald Trump. Without those issues, the Democrats appear reduced to the party that aligns with woke, and the teachers unions. That isn’t enough, not popular enough, not pertinent to ongoing crises.

They will have to find out what they believe in and stand for. They’ll likely have to have the fight they’ve been prudently dodging the past dozen years, between moderate centrists and progressives. Somebody’s going to have to win that battle.

As for the Republicans, this would be the perfect time, while the camera’s on the GOP, for some friendly persuasion, and reaching toward potential friends and waverers.

Victors always want to be bold, because boldness shows strength and impresses people. But there is a line between bold and delusional. This isn’t time to frighten the horses. That’s what the appointment of the harebrained Rep. Matt Gaetz to head the Justice Department did, and Mar-a-Lago is lucky they had enough friends in the Republican Senate to stop it.

I suspect most people are enthused about the idea of the Department of Government Efficiency to be headed up by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. It’s the kind of thing that catches the imagination. Mr. Musk is a genius and visionary, Mr. Ramaswamey appears to be an activist with energy, and a mind full of certainties. But Mr. Musk is also an unusual fellow, unique, and Mr. Ramaswamy has zero experience in the federal government.

I’m glad they think outside the box, but the box still exists, and for reasons. If your eyes have been at all open the past quarter-century, you know the administrative state is huge, largely unaccountable, and consists at least in part of levels of waste and sloth built on previous levels of redundancy and nonsense. Federal workers the past four years have, amazingly, made themselves look unnecessary by not bothering to show up at the office, and working at home. But some federal workers are the best we have—brilliant, unheralded, doing life-and-death work, making the wheels turn.

Real reformers have to be sophisticated, orderly, unshowy. They need internal allies.

Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy are daring and theatrical. I’d worry that early on they’ll start running around with axes, making big pronouncements, chopping holes through doors, and putting their heads through the holes and saying, “Heeeere’s . . . Johnny!’

Progress isn’t re-enacting “The Shining.” May they be steady.

And back to our beginning. If you believe in democracy, in our democratic republic, you accept, with as much peace as you can muster, democratic outcomes. You do this out of respect for America—for those who invented it and spun it into motion—and out of respect for your fellow citizens, who’ve made a decision. We just did that. And happy 161st Thanksgiving to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Appeared in the November 30, 2024, print edition as 'America Has Much to Be Thankful For'.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/america-has-much-to-be-thankful-for-452806fb