This week, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas celebrated America’s 250th anniversary by exposing the greatest threat to the Declaration of Independence today—the ideology of Progressivism.
“Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement—with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War—to openly oppose the principles of the declaration,” the justice said in a speech at the University of Texas at Austin Wednesday. “Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident.”
With his characteristic brilliance, Thomas cut through the Orwellian masquerade of Progressivism to reveal what it truly is—a fundamentally backward movement. By rejecting the solid footing of the declaration, Progressivism opened America to central planning and administrative rule.
While the declaration bases governmental authority on the consent of the governed and God creating human beings with inalienable rights, under Progressivism, “liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government.”
Explaining Progressivism
Thomas noted that President Woodrow “Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired. Progressives like Wilson argued that America need to leave behind the principles of the founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated system of relatively unimpeded state power.”
Yet Thomas also quoted President Calvin Coolidge, who delivered a powerful address on the 150th anniversary of the declaration.
“If all men are created equal, that is final,” Coolidge said. “If they are endowed with unalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress, can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which they can proceed historically is not forward but backward.”
The Rotten Fruit of Progressivism
Thomas laid out exactly how backward Progressivism would take America.
“Progressives believed that Darwinian science, the idea of ever-advancing progress written into biology itself, had proven the inherent superiority and inferiority of the races,” he noted.
“It was only a small step for Wilson to re-segregate the federal workforce. It was only another step for the government to launch sterilization programs on those deemed by the experts of the day to be unfit to reproduce, upheld by my court in Buck v. Bell.”
The declaration’s central claims trace back to thinkers like John Locke, and Thomas noted that “European thinkers have long criticized America for remaining trapped in a Lockean world with its weak, decentralized government and strong individual rights.”
“But we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bonds for the supposedly enlightened world of [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel, [Karl] Marx, and their followers,” Thomas said.
“Fascism—which, after all, was national socialism—triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions,” he noted. “The socialism of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China proceeded to kill more tens of millions of their own people. This is what happens when natural rights give way to the higher good notions of history, progress, or as Thomas Sowell has written, the visions of the anointed.”
(Sowell’s 1995 book “The Vision of the Anointed” exposes the hubris of America’s intellectual and political elite and the mentality behind their destructive policies on education, crime, and family life.)
“None of this, of course, was an improvement on the principles of the declaration,” Thomas added, wryly.
Why the Speech Matters
Thomas’ speech comes as President Donald Trump has attempted to root out much of the Progressivist “woke” ideology out of the federal government and other parts of American society.
Progressivism’s preference for technocratic government today travels alongside other ideas, such as critical race theory (the notion that America is systemically racist and requires a fundamental overhaul), transgender ideology (the idea that a man can become a woman and vice versa), and climate alarmism (the idea that the world is ending due to human use of fossil fuels).
These issues converge into a worldview I describe as “woke,” and that worldview forms the basis of the Left’s infrastructure—which heavily influenced federal policy under President Joe Biden.
Trump has put woke ideology on the back foot, but the Left is not rejecting these ideas. America is strangely fortunate at the 250th anniversary to have a president who takes pride in its founding, rather than one who rejects the founding as racist, backward, or “transphobic”—but that does not mean the threat is over.
Americans must heed Clarence Thomas’ warning. The battle between the Declaration of Independence and Progressivism isn’t a matter of disagreeing on means to achieving the same ends—such as asking whether raising or lowering taxes will better handle the deficit. Unfortunately, the battle often boils down to whether America remains faithful to its founding ideals or rejects them in favor of the Left’s latest justification to grasp unlimited power.
Thomas rightly explained that woke Progressivism is actually extremely backward—and America must reject it, not just on the 250th anniversary of the declaration, but yesterday, today, and forever.
I pray at least some Democrats will heed his pertinent warning.
