Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas warned of the threat progressivism poses to the United States and its founding principles during a speech about the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Thomas addressed a crowd on Wednesday at the University of Texas at Austin, where he discussed the semiquincentennial on July 4, in a roughly 50-minute speech. He warned that it is “unclear” if the founding principles of limited government and individual rights will endure, pointing to the rise of progressivism, which began during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency in the 1910s.
“Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many inroads into our system of government and our way of life,” Thomas said. “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.”
Thomas said that, with the exception of “pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War,” progressivism was the first major political movement in the U.S. to oppose the country’s founding principles. He said that the movement “strove to undo the declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident.”
“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence, our form of government,” Thomas said. “It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from 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.”
Thomas’s comments come as the Supreme Court works its way through a deluge of cases that pit the executive and judicial branches against each other. One of the Supreme Court’s most conservative justices, Thomas is considered a strong originalist, meaning his opinions tend to interpret the Constitution through the lens of what the country’s founders intended at the time.
Thomas warned in his speech that progressivism globally “caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen,” pointing to the horrors of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy, and Mao Zedong’s communist China.
“All were intertwined with the rise of progressivism and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our declaration are based,” Thomas said. “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, unalienable natural rights.”
He also stated that progressivism was a shield that Wilson used to defend the Supreme Court’s infamous ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which permitted “separate but equal” racial segregation, and he noted how it allowed the 28th president to resegregate the federal workforce and for the government to “launch sterilization programs on those deemed by the experts of the day to be unfit to reproduce.”
Thomas, the most senior justice on the high court, has been a conservative titan for the nearly 25 years he has been on the Supreme Court. Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the U.S., he told the assembled crowd not to be “passive spectators” for the occasion and find the same courage of the signers of the Declaration of Independence to stand up for the country’s founding principles.
“By all means, celebrate the Declaration of Independence,” Thomas said. “It is the most important act of American history, the foundation of our Constitution, and as [President Abraham] Lincoln said, the sheet anchor of our republic. But I implore you to celebrate it by standing up for it, by defending it, and by recommitting yourselves to living up to its ideals.”
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The U.S. will celebrate its 250th anniversary on July 4 with events nationwide celebrating the Declaration of Independence.
Supreme Court justices will return to Washington on Friday, when they are expected to release at least one opinion, followed by oral arguments in various cases over the next two weeks, beginning on Monday. The high court’s term is expected to conclude with all opinions being released by the end of June, days before the country’s semiquincentennial.