There is a well-established finding in the political science literature, traceable at least to Lipset and Rokkan’s 1967 work on cleavage structures, that dominant coalitions facing an internal challenge from their left flank tend to abandon programmatic debate in favor of symbolic boundary-policing. What we are watching in Wisconsin is not novel. It is a textbook case.
VOA Korea Service (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsFrancesca Hong, a 37-year-old democratic socialist, state representative, and former chef, is the frontrunner for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Her platform includes fully funded public schools, universal childcare, paid leave, and cheaper healthcare. Her opponents, backed by an outgoing governor and a centrist commentariat that has spent the better part of a decade warning that leftism will doom the party, have responded to this agenda by excavating a deleted 2020 tweet in which she wrote “Cancel Thanksgiving” during a pandemic that had already killed 300,000 Americans. The New York Times, that great institutional barometer of respectable anxiety, ran the headline “A Democratic Socialist Disparaged Thanksgiving. Can Voters Forgive Her?” Their on-the-ground reporting located exactly one Wisconsinite who could not.
Neera Tanden, now president of the Center for American Progress, took to X to ask Hong whether people “hate Thanksgiving” in the kitchens she has worked in, which is a remarkable question from someone whose own institutional trajectory has been defined by the precise kind of donor-class proximity that Hong’s campaign exists to challenge. But one should not read Tanden’s intervention as mere personal pique. It is structural. The Center for American Progress, like the broader centrist ecosystem it anchors, has a vested interest in the proposition that the Left must perpetually disavow its own convictions. The “vibe shift” narrative that commentators have been selling since Trump’s re-election requires a functioning bogeyman, and if the bogeyman obliges by questioning a national holiday’s colonial origins, so much the better.
cottonbro studio / PexelsWhat is striking, from an analytical standpoint, is the poverty of the establishment’s toolkit. Attacks on Hong’s mental health history were deployed and widely read as the grubby ratfucking they were. The search for voters incensed about her association with the streamer Hasan Piker has produced nothing usable. “Cancel Thanksgiving” was, as The Intercept’s Ryan Grim observed, the last bullet in the gun, and it is telling that the gun was nearly empty. When a political faction cannot defeat an opponent on policy grounds, when universal healthcare and rent control no longer produce the reflexive recoil they once did, when even Jonathan Chait has been forced to concede that AIPAC spending and unconditional support for Israeli aid are now electoral liabilities, the faction turns to cultural signifiers. It demands loyalty not to any material program but to a mythological America defined by pilgrims and gratitude, an America that, conveniently, cannot be criticized without being accused of ingratitude toward the very foundations that produced the inequalities the Left seeks to address.
This is the deeper function of the Thanksgiving controversy, and it is why it should be read as something more than a silly season distraction. Forcing a candidate to affirm a foundational national myth is a mechanism of ideological discipline. It sets the outer boundary of permissible critique. If you cannot question Thanksgiving, you cannot question the colonial architecture that Thanksgiving obscures, and if you cannot question that, you certainly cannot question the property regimes, the labor hierarchies, and the carceral apparatuses that descend from it.
US Department of Labor (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsHong has already capitulated, now claiming Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday, which will satisfy no one who demanded the capitulation and disappoint everyone who hoped she would not. That is how disciplinary mechanisms work. The demand was never about the holiday. It was about demonstrating that the Left can be made to kneel, and the fact that the only available weapon was a five-year-old pandemic tweet tells you everything you need to know about the establishment’s remaining intellectual capital, which is to say: none.