The Declaration’s Truths Heal a Multitude of Errors

Justice Clarence Thomas’s speech on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence at the University of Texas at Austin launched a frontal attack on progressivism. For this, it has received much nationwide attention. But Thomas’s speech focused not merely on the negative. Instead, it defended American political thought against broader criticism of the Declaration from both the right and the left. It calls on our Nation to return to our founding ideals, not simply because they are old, but because they are good.

Partisan critics immediately mistook the speech as a commentary on contemporary politics. For example, one of President Trump’s fiercest critics, Michael Luttig (a former Justice Department official and federal judge appointed by George H.W. Bush), incredibly argued that Justice Thomas should not have given the speech because it might somehow lend support to President Trump, the Republican Party, and even the January 6 conspirators and rioters. “The overarching significance of Justice Thomas’ speech last week is that it represents the intellectual political and constitutional [sic] philosophies for Donald Trump’s two presidencies and his entire MAGA movement,” Luttig wrote on his Substack and declared during an appearance on the channel formerly known as MSNBC. “It was these political and constitutional philosophies that underlaid and justified Donald Trump’s failed plan to cling to power on January 6, 2021, the architect of which was John Eastman.” (Eastman, by the way, was one of Luttig’s law clerks when he served as a federal appellate judge).

But Luttig and his fellow critics either deliberately misread the speech or labor under an ignorance of American political thought. They confuse the great movement of the early twentieth century with those who deploy “progressive” today merely as a synonym for today’s much-derided “liberal.”  They attacked the lecture because they predictably mistook the political theory of progressivism – with its denial of natural rights, Darwinian understanding of society, and trust in broad government power exercised by independent experts – for the pale imitators who claim its mantle today.

Critics missed that Thomas did much more than describe the fundamental conflict between the decentralized government of our Founding and the all-powerful technocracy of Woodrow Wilson. He sought to re-center the Founding’s legitimacy not on its history, but on its morality. This implicitly responded to attacks on the Declaration from both the left and the right. On the left, the New York Times’ 1619 Project asserts that the Declaration’s ideals were false from the start. Instead of 1776 or 1789, the project claims, America’s true founding date was 1619, when the first African-American slaves arrived on American soil. The project presents American history as a one-dimensional narrative driven by the oppression of racial minorities from the beginning. This is nothing new. The very defenders of slavery also claimed that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were false. John Calhoun, the South’s most ardent defender of slavery, declared in 1848 that the declaration that all men are created equal “is the most false and dangerous of all political errors.” “It made no necessary part of … declaring ourselves independent,” he claimed. If the New York Times knew more history, it should have included Calhoun as one of its inspirations.

Dred Scott v. Sanford also had to deny the Declaration’s clear and obvious meaning. Its principle that all men are created equal, Chief Justice Taney conceded, “would seem to embrace the whole human family.” But white supremacists could not accept the Declaration’s obvious meaning. “It is too clear for dispute,” Taney wrote, “that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration.” According to Taney, science, historical practice, and enlightened opinion agreed that blacks should be doomed to slavery forever.

Lincoln directly rejected this argument. Commenting on the Declaration in 1859, Lincoln said: “All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”  Both the critical race theorists of today and the antebellum defenders of slavery cannot abide Lincoln. They share the same belief that the Declaration of Independence is a lie and that the single fact of race has determined American history.

The Declaration has also come under fire from some on the so-called postliberal right for its “small-L” liberalism. These critics believe the Declaration ushered in a government that has prized individual autonomy. Autonomy, we are told, has produced an amoral society that seeks only to keep individuals from harming each other but does not promote virtue. Liberalism, in this Lockean sense, permits the drug culture, the sexual revolution, and the decline of the family. Post-liberals believe that a government that protects the equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is not enough; the state must also instill virtue in its citizens to reverse modern harms.

These attacks on the Declaration from both the left and the right deny the universal character of its self-evident truths and their foundation in natural law. As Justice Thomas’s speech makes clear, those on the left believe that rights come not from the nature of man, but from government and historical development. These critics see the republicanism of the Declaration as bound to the time of the Founding, and not appropriate for the modern world. They think our society has evolved morally, politically, and intellectually. Why listen to the past, when we are so much smarter today?  

Justice Thomas shows where the left goes wrong. The 1619 Project errs in misunderstanding the Founding. It focuses on the inequality in practice at the time of the Declaration rather than the moral system – the belief in equality – that the Framers used as the measure of man. Justice Thomas’s speech equally responds to the critics on the right. They, too, fail to appreciate the moral character of the Declaration of Independence.

Justice Thomas’s speech shows that morality infused the Founding and that it can be found in the Declaration. He reads the Founding to provide us with the moral principle that all men and women are fundamentally equal in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It creates a society in which the government exists to protect these rights and arises from the principle of individual consent. The Constitution more carefully defines the individual rights that implement these principles. The Founders believed that we have the duty to worship God freely and, therefore, the right to religious freedom among our fellow men. We have the duty to live according to the truth, so we have the rights to freedom of speech, of the press, and of association. We must defend our right to life, so we have the right to bear arms.

Justice Thomas’s arguments call for renewed attention to the Founding. He asks us to re-dedicate ourselves, much as Lincoln did at Gettysburg, to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. He invites us to consider and debate whether we must obey the Declaration not just because it is old, but because it is good. Thomas’ speech delivered not just an intellectual attack on progressivism, but also a sermon on public virtue. He demands that we measure ourselves against the values of those who fought the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. I pray that we can meet his challenge.

John Yoo is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin.

Read Justice Clarence Thomas’s full remarks here.