In his official Thanksgiving Day proclamation, President Obama repeated a frequent claim of his that, despite any good intentions behind it, is fundamentally wrong. It is wrong as a matter of faith, of history, and of American political theory. To correct that error requires no opposition to any particular policy, no overtly political stance at all; it merely requires constructive criticism offered in the spirit of good will.

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   The old professor mused aloud, half to himself: “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”

    That line came from the great children’s classic and Christian allegory, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The fictional professor’s lament (about two siblings’ confusion about which of two stories to believe), written some 60 years ago, still applies today. Along with logic, basic arithmetic and linguistic skills sometimes seem horribly lacking among the American electorate, especially among young adults.

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Across conservative List-Serves and Twitter accounts and Facebook discussions on the day after the election, verbal daggers were drawn, and sometimes drawing blood, about who and what was responsible for the big Republican losses. Alas, much of the blame, at least from the younger set, was being aimed at cultural traditionalists.

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America has faced crossroads before. Its citizens (or directly chosen representatives) have faced stark choices going all the way back to the debate over ratifying the new Constitution drafted in 1787. But entirely level-headed people in large numbers are saying they have rarely even imagined an election as fraught with meaning as the one next week.

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