Americans are accustomed to having a lot to be grateful for on Thanksgiving Day. We have been fat and happy for so long that we consider peace and prosperity our heritage, if not our right.

It is easy to decry that as complacency or smugness, but what we often see as apathy is also a kind of faith, a well-founded confidence in our country, its people and its institutions. Today we have particular reason to be thankful for that.

This year’s presidential election has left many political observers gasping for breath and grasping for increasingly ominous adjectives. The two campaigns have accused each other of everything from vote rigging to racism, tried to outdo each other’s constitutional hyperbole and threatened to drag the nation through weeks of litigation. Through it all, Washington pundits and Sunday morning talking heads have warned us of a potential Electoral College disaster and dreadful consequences for the presidency. Washington Post columnist David Broder summed up that view saying that as a nation, "We are skating on thin ice."

The people, however, know better. Their response this Thanksgiving Day is essentially this: Pass the mashed potatoes.

This election is not a constitutional crisis; it is a political mess – and the American people have responded to it not with apathy but with aplomb. In that assurance lies the real strength of our democracy.

A dollar is worth a dollar not because of its intrinsic value, but because we honor it. The greenback is accepted worldwide for no other reason than because Americans have agreed to accept it as payment for "all debts, public and private."

Americans will likewise accept the result of this election. This country has had close elections before, and stolen elections, and now it has a tie. Regardless of who wins, half the country will consider the next president a sanctimonious hypocrite or a pampered dimwit – and in either case he will be a lame duck the day he is sworn in.

The republic will survive that, too. For all the talk of crisis, there are no tanks in the streets, no threatened coups, no deaths – absences remarkable to any student of history. The only battles are in court and the people have taken, not to the streets, but to holiday feasting.