Clarence Thomas’ attack on progressivism should alarm you
Like a modern-day Paul Revere, Clarence Thomas is sounding the alarm: Progressives are an existential threat, determined to destroy all you hold dear, unless you are willing to sacrifice and fight them with everything you have. Perhaps you think that’s a bit aggressive coming from a Supreme Court justice charged with making dispassionate decisions about the Constitution and the rule of law. But he made his position clear in an April 15 speech before invited faculty and students at the University of Texas at Austin. You have been warned.
The speech was supposed to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which the nation will be celebrating this summer. (For his part, Donald Trump is planning an IndyCar street race around Washington, D.C., and a UFC fight on the White House lawn.) Thomas used the opportunity to charge that “progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” adding that the ideology “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.”
It does?
This is well-trod philosophical ground — referencing “negative” and “positive” rights, natural law and all the usual back and forth about originalism and whether the Constitution is living or static. We know where Thomas says he stands on those arguments, although these days he seems perfectly willing to throw precedent in the trash and back authoritarian policies if it suits his ideological whim.
Nonetheless, it was an interesting speech, and a highly political one — mainly because the justice chose to hark back to the original Progressive Movement that began in the 1890s and lasted until the 1920s as a way to attack those who call themselves progressives today.
Nonetheless, it was an interesting speech, and a highly political one — mainly because the justice chose to hark back to the original Progressive Movement that began in the 1890s and lasted until the 1920s as a way to attack those who call themselves progressives today. Thomas spent an inordinate amount of time attacking Woodrow Wilson as progressivism’s intellectual and spiritual leader, when I would guess that most people who identify that way today couldn’t tell you when he was president much less what he believed in. And if they do know who he was, they would almost certainly reject vast swathes of his philosophy. He was, after all, an unreconstructed racist and eugenicist — something Thomas seems to suggest is a feature of progressivism, which could not be more wrong.
At the heart of the movement, he suggested, was a scorn for the country. “You will not be surprised to learn that the progressives had a great deal of contempt for us, the American people,” the justice said. “Before he entered politics, Wilson would describe the American people as ‘selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn and foolish.’” The 28th president, Thomas said, “aspired to be like Germany, where the people, he said admiringly, were ‘docile and acquiescent.’”
You see where this is going. “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,” he said, before adding, “Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people.”
That’s quite an indictment.
It’s true that there was a faction of the left that identified as communist and admired the Soviet Union from the time of the October Revolution and into the late 1940s and 1950s. But very few of those one would call progressives, such as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, had those leanings. As for 20th-century fascism, there was indeed a strong attraction to the ideology among a certain group of Americans — but they were on the right, not the left. In other words, Thomas’ view of the philosophy isn’t completely wrong in some of the historical detail, but it’s as relevant to today’s politics as the Whigs or the Know-Nothings of the mid-1800s.
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Throughout the speech, Thomas often used past tense in describing the movement. But the point he was making was evident — the ideology it unleashed remains a clear and present danger. At several turns, the justice shifted to present tense, and he did not mince words: “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government.” It “is not possible,” he declared, for the Declaration and progressivism “to coexist forever.”
Coming from the mouth of an associate justice of the Supreme Court, those words — and their implications — are jaw-dropping and cause for alarm. If you read between the lines, he is saying that the country is at war, and the battles are not just political or philosophical. They are also spiritual. But Thomas’ attack on the left is really just a slightly more elegant indictment than the ones you might read on an obscure Reddit thread, or have read on an old Usenet forum back in the 1990s. His argument — that the left is determined to take away individual freedom and destroy the Constitution — is an old one, and it’s as stale and tired as it gets. This being the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, he was clever enough to attach it to a defense of the Declaration of Independence, all the while presumably knowing very well that its author, Thomas Jefferson, said that “it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual Constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation…” Were he alive today, Jefferson would likely have been among the first to sign on to the fundamental progressive philosophy that the Constitution is a living document designed to adapt and change as society evolves.
But Clarence Thomas, like many conservatives in this misbegotten era, suffers from Fox News brainrot, a condition that encourages them to wallow in the bitterness of their own experience while believing the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of people who refuse to accept the way things are supposed to work. The perspective of Thomas and others like him has become so warped that they can work themselves into a paranoid frenzy about “progressivism” wielding government power at the expense of the individual, even as they defend a president who is systematically tearing up the Constitution and setting it on fire. In his speech, Thomas said that many Americans no longer accept that “all men are created equal” and deserving of “unalienable rights” protected by limited government. He’s right about that. But it’s his own compatriots who feel that way, not progressives.
Following his speech, Thomas took some questions from the audience. When one person asked him about friendship on the court, the man who had just spent nearly an hour ripping progressives to shreds and drawing parallels to Nazis and mass murderers replied, “I joined the court that dealt with differences as friends, as we respected each other. And I don’t know how that civility — I don’t know how you bring it back in the current environment with social media and name-calling and all people accusing each other of various things and animus.”
Gosh, I wonder how that happened?
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