Reclaiming Our American Inheritance

Justice Clarence Thomas remarks at the University of Texas at Austin in celebration of America’s approaching 250th birthday were delivered with characteristic moral clarity and quiet courage, Thomas did two essential things: he reminded us of the self-evident truths at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, and he called on ordinary Americans to defend those truths with determination and resolve. His appeal was not directed at elites in academia or the media. It was aimed squarely at the heartland—where real patriotism and everyday sacrifice still run deep. “Intellectuals want you to believe that our founding principles are matters of esoteric philosophy or sophisticated debate,” he warned. “They overcomplicate them, take the spirit out of them, and discuss them in a manner that puts us to sleep.”

Those principles remain breathtakingly simple and revolutionary: All human beings are created equal. From that fundamental equality flow natural rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that exist prior to and independent of government. The government does not grant these rights; its only legitimate purpose is to secure them.

Our Constitution was established in accordance with that purpose, yet Thomas understands better than most living Americans how our government has failed to secure natural rights equally for all Americans. But unlike so many who assert that failure as proof that the natural law principles of the Declaration are not self-evidently true, Thomas offers this perspective: “When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that promoted unequal treatment, it was obvious that you did not get your rights or your dignity from those governments, but from God.”  

This insight lies at the very heart of Thomas’s message. It is the same insight Abraham Lincoln invoked against Chief Justice Taney’s sophistry in the Dred Scott decision. The Founders, Lincoln explained, “did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality.” They meant instead “to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.”

Justice Thomas, like Lincoln before him, instructs about the need to make the principles of the Declaration both familiar and revered. He warns of the grave threat posed by Progressive ideology that, for more than a century, has worked to supplant the Declaration’s vision of universal, inalienable natural rights with an ever-evolving notion of “progress” directed by government experts. Thomas rightly calls the adoption of this view “a terrible mistake.” Denying the truth of human equality opened the door to the worst atrocities of the twentieth century—government-sponsored eugenics to rid society of those deemed “undesirable,” totalitarianism, and ultimately mass annihilation.

Progressivism’s core delusion—that flawed human nature can be perfected through unlimited state power—directly contradicts the Founders’ realistic view of human imperfection and their genius for limited government, separation of powers, and checks and balances.

For more than three decades on the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas has faithfully upheld that constitutional framework. Some critics, however, dismiss Thomas’s message as outdated or even dangerous. They insist that rights come not from God or nature but from government itself. After all, they argue, it was the government that emancipated the slaves, passed civil rights laws, and expanded political rights over time. To speak of natural rights that preexist the state, they claim, shows a failure to understand how democracy actually works.

This critique sounds sophisticated but collapses under scrutiny. It conveniently forgets that the moral force behind emancipation, the Civil War, and the civil-rights movement sprang directly from the Declaration’s principles—invoked not to expand government power, but to restrain it and hold it accountable to a higher standard. When government itself becomes the oppressor, as it did under slavery and Jim Crow, the only reliable source of dignity and rights is the one that lies beyond the state’s reach. To credit the government alone for our freedoms is to ignore the very principles that made those freedoms possible in the first place.

The view that rights are whatever the government decides to grant is the same defective view of human nature that once fueled the most destructive ideologies of the last century. Strip away the anchor of natural rights, and nothing remains save whatever rights the powerful are willing to dispense. That is not republican government or even democracy; it is the path to the very tyranny the Founders sought to prevent.

Thomas calls forth the final words of the Declaration, an exhortation that had been similarly invoked by Abraham Lincoln in 1838:

As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor.  

The spirit of 1776 is not a dusty relic for academic seminars. It is a living inheritance meant to be reclaimed not as passive spectators, but as free citizens and determined guardians of the greatest experiment in human liberty the world has ever known.

Linda Denno is a senior fellow at the Civitas Institute. She is also Associate Dean of the University of Arizona, College of Applied Science and Technology headquartered at the branch campus in Sierra Vista, Arizona.

Read Justice Clarence Thomas's full remarks.