CLARENCE THOMAS SPEAKING ON AMERICAN GOVERNMENT
This is an excerpt of remarks Justice Clarence Thomas delivered 4/15/26 at the University of Texas, Austin, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:
The Constitution is the means of government; it is the Declaration that announces the ends of government. The Constitution achieves this purpose by protecting our natural rights and liberties from concentrated power and excessive democracy. Our Constitution creates a separation of powers and federalism—truly for the first time in modern history—to prevent the government from becoming so strong that it threatens our natural rights. Federalist No. 10 proposed the idea that the great threat to our rights comes from majority faction.
Human history teaches us, alas, that numerical majorities frequently seek to control government, and use the state to violate the rights of the minority. Because man is fallen and the desire for power was, as James Madisondescribed it, “sown in the nature of man,” government had to be limited. For, as Madison said, “if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” But men are not angels. The slaveholders used the power of government to deny the fundamental natural rights of the slaves; the segregationists used the state to oppress the freed men and women—including my ancestors.
As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure. At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism. Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.
Progressivism was not native to America. 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 needed to leave behind the principles of the Founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated people of Europe. Wilson called Germany’s system of relatively unimpeded state power “nearly perfected.” He acknowledged that it was “a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle,” which “offers none but what are to our minds alien ideas.” He thus described America, still stuck with its original system of government, as “slow to see” the superiority of the European system.
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. Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident. To Wilson, the inalienable rights of the individual were “a lot of nonsense.” Wilson redefined “liberty” not as a natural right antecedent to the government, but as “the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs and interests.” In other words, liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God, but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government. The government, as Wilson reconceived of it, would be “beneficent and indispensable.” Progressives such as John Dewey attacked the Framers for believing that “their ideas [were] immutable truths good at all times and places,” when instead they were “historically conditioned, and relevant only to their own time.” Now, Dewey and the progressives argued, those ideas were to be repealed.
Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.
You will not be surprised to learn that the progressives had a great deal of contempt for us, the American people. Before he entered politics, Wilson would describe the American people as “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn” and “foolish.” He lamented that we “do too much by vote” and too little by expert rule. He proposed that the people be ruled by administrators who use them as “tools.” He once again aspired to be like Germany, where the people, he said admiringly, were “docile and acquiescent.”
The century of progressivism did not go well. The European system that Wilson and the progressives scolded Americans for not adopting, which he called nearly perfect, led to the governments that caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration was based. Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people.
It was a terrible mistake to adopt Progressivism’s rejection of the Declaration’s vision of universal, inalienable natural rights. Wilson’s claim that natural rights must give way to historical progress could justify the greatest mistakes in our history. In Plessy v. Ferguson, my court upheld Louisiana’s system of racial segregation because “separate but equal,” it observed, was reasonable in light of “the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order.” It comes as no surprise that the progressives embraced eugenics. 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. It was only a small step for Wilson to resegregate 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 in an opinion written by no less a figure than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
We can argue over whether you believe in immutable, absolute natural rights or the Wilsonian idea of ever-progressing history. . . . But let me ask you to consider the consequences. European thinkers have long criticized America for remaining trapped in a Lockean world, with its weak decentralized government and strong individual rights. They say our 18th-century Declaration has prevented us from progressing to higher forms of government. Why has America never had a socialist party, one German sociologist famously asked. But we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bounds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx and their followers. Fascism—which, after all, was a national socialism—triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions. 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 of notions of history, progress, or, as Thomas Sowell has written, the “vision of the anointed.”
None of this, of course, was an improvement on the principles of the Declaration. Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” is largely about how America owed its superiority over Europe to its conscious decision to reject central planning and administrative rule root and branch. Progressivism, in other words, is retrogressive. As Calvin Coolidge said on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration:
“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable 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 he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”
When Abraham Lincoln addressed the assembled crowd at Gettysburg, they had gathered to memorialize the past. But Lincoln’s address urged them to not do so with complacency. Instead, Lincoln said, they would look to the past as inspiration to take them to greater heights in the future. “It is rather for us,” Lincoln said, “to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation . . . shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government, of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”