Justice Thomas Teaches About the Declaration and Its Opponents

In a speech celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and America’s founding principles, Justice Clarence Thomas took aim at turn-of-the-twentieth-century Progressives as having been largely responsible for undermining those principles. He touched a nerve among today’s progressives, many of whom have published denunciations.

Their hysteria is unsurprising, given the lengths that today’s Leftists have taken to connect themselves with their original Progressive antecedents. Since the term “liberal” became a dirty word in the 1980s, the Left has sought an alternative label, landing on the term “progressive.”  This goes beyond mere repackaging: in the 2008 presidential primary, Hillary Clinton named Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as the principal aspirations for her brand of liberalism, and President Obama launched his economic vision in Osawatomie, Kansas—the very place TR had given his 1910 “New Nationalism” speech.

The Left doesn’t want us to notice that they predicate their core governing vision on a rejection of America’s founding principles, and so they are bound to protest Thomas’s account. Yet his account is dead-on accurate, and for proof one need only look to the original Progressives, who were open in their disdain of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In this, they were far more honest than their present-day cousins.

The Declaration’s opening lines declare that “all men are created equal” in the natural rights given to them by their Creator. These rights precede government and are more fundamental; any just government is thus obligated to secure them, which human beings possess by virtue of their nature. Establishing these principles immediately was essential to the Declaration’s practical task—explaining how the British government in North America had failed to fulfill its obligations. That part of the Declaration is also what Woodrow Wilson wished us to disregard, because he knew that its inherent limits on government obstructed the radically novel Progressive policy agenda.

In a speech ostensibly celebrating Thomas Jefferson, Wilson claimed that the best way to honor the Declaration was, paradoxically, to “not repeat the preface.” Here Wilson referenced the well-known lines: natural equality among men, God-given rights, etc. Why shouldn’t we repeat these? Because progressivism’s whole point is to repudiate the founding’s permanent protections for individual liberty and to remove limits on government. Frank J. Goodnow, a leading Progressive intellectual and founding president of the American Political Science Association, explained that under the new Progressive vision, the state replaces the Creator as the source of an individual’s duties and rights. Rights and duties are “conferred upon him not by his Creator, but rather by the society to which he belongs. What they are is to be determined by the legislative authority.”

Theodore Roosevelt was equally committed to these progressive principles, even though he and Wilson faced off in the 1912 election. He insisted in his 1910 “New Nationalism” speech that there was a “general right of the community to regulate” the earning of income and use of private property “to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.”  In his “Autobiography,” Roosevelt wrote that he “declined to adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary for the nation could not be done by the President unless he could find some specific authorization to do it.” For Roosevelt, the national government was not one of enumerated powers, but of general or plenary powers. The government should be able to do whatever it wanted, and the Constitution’s role was to state the narrow exceptions to that rule. This interpretation reverses the Founders’ vision; Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist that the plenary power TR later championed was more suitable to a monarchy than a republic.

Wilson also repudiated the Founding’s republican principles, conceding that the Progressives’ version of democracy was more akin to socialism. He wrote that “socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members.”  Socialism holds that “no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the State may not cross at will,” and Wilson observed that progressive democracy rests on the same foundation.

This explains why the Progressives acknowledged the novelty of their political vision; they knew it required a repudiation of America’s Declaration and Constitution. In his essay that established the administrative state’s foundations, Wilson was forthright about his new political science replacing the original: “Where has this science grown up? . . . It has found its doctors in Europe. It is not of our making; it is a foreign science.”

It is understandable that, in this year of celebrating the Declaration’s 250th anniversary, today’s progressives hesitate to acknowledge that their vision for America hinges on rejecting the Declaration’s teaching. At least the original Progressives admitted to it, and Justice Thomas can hardly be blamed for pointing this out.

Ronald J. Pestritto is Graduate Dean at Hillsdale College and Senior Fellow of The Claremont Institute.

Read Justice Clarence Thomas’s full remarks here.