Perspective #90
Justice Clarence Thomas: On the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
Today, I pass along part of a recent speech by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. It’s about 12 minutes from his 50-minute speech on YouTube. I make some comments along the way that may be hard to distinguish from the speech itself. My comments are in italics and preceded by a bullet.
We share the joy of America’s founding and our 250 years of enjoying (and also trying to live up to) our founding ideals. Much of what annoys us today can be reduced to utopian ideas and ideals. There is no utopia that comes close to the Kingdom of God that Christ taught. We feel the longing for a perfect society in our bones, but all such utopian plans are not only out of reach but can be (and have been) fatal.
Remember the Prisoners
Remember the Persecuted Church
Remember those in War Zones.
Thanks for reading,
John
JT Introduction: On April 15, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gave a speech at the University of Texas on the founding of the United States. He spoke our founding by British farmers and entrepreneurs, along with Christian dissenters. Our founders were not like Rome’s wolf-suckled children or like primordial gods who stirred the ocean forming Japan. Not William Tell (Switzerland), not Sky Woman and the Great Turtle (Iroquois). Our founding unfolded in plain sight in the decades leading up to 1776. He began by telling of his early life and education, in which both biblical and American ideals were taught but not confused.
Here are excerpts from that speech. My comments will be in italics and preceded with a •.
“The Constitution is the means of government; it is the Declaration that announces the ends of government. The Constitution achieves this purpose by protecting our natural rights and liberties from concentrated power and excessive democracy. Our Constitution creates a separation of powers and federalism—truly for the first time in modern history—to prevent the government from becoming so strong that it threatens our natural rights. Federalist No. 10 proposed the idea that the great threat to our rights comes from majority faction.
“Human history teaches us, alas, that numerical majorities frequently seek to control government, and use the state to violate the rights of the minority. Because man is fallen and the desire for power was, as James Madison described it, ‘sown in the nature of man,’ government had to be limited. For, as Madison said, ‘if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.’ But, alas, men are not angels. The slaveholders used the power of government to deny the fundamental natural rights of the slaves; the segregationists used the state to oppress the freed men and women—including my ancestors.”
• Justice Thomas quickly gets to a hinge of the American experiment led by President Woodrow Wilson, who sought to improve on the Declaration and Constitution.
“As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure…. Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism 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.”
• Justice Thomas explains that these ideas came from Europe, especially under Germany’s Otto von Bismarck, and that Wilson was eager for the US to catch up with Europe’s ‘nearly perfected’ ways.
“Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement—with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War—to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration. Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident. To Wilson, the inalienable rights of the individual were ‘a lot of nonsense.’
“Wilson redefined ‘liberty’ not as a natural right antecedent to the government, but as “the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs and interests.” In other words, liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government.”
• Remarkably, Wilson also believed these modern ideas were needed to replace the outdated ones of the founding. Thomas, noting the contempt these leaders had for the ignorant and stubborn Americans, continues:
“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the 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. Before he entered politics, Wilson would describe the American people as ‘selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn and foolish.’ He lamented that we ‘do too much by vote’ and too little by expert rule. He proposed that the people be ruled by administrators who use them as ‘tools.’ He once again aspired to be like Germany, where the people, he said admiringly, were “docile and acquiescent.”
“The century of progressivism did not go well. The European system that Wilson and the progressives scolded Americans for not adopting, which he called nearly perfect, led to the governments that caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen. 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. 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, inalienable natural rights. Wilson’s claim that natural rights must give way to historical progress could justify the greatest mistake in our history. In Plessy v. Ferguson, my court upheld Louisiana’s system of racial segregation because “separate but equal,” it observed, was reasonable in light of “the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order.”
•Thomas notes that these experts who would fix America wanted not only to control education but to remove undesirables through sterilization.
“We can argue over whether you believe in immutable, absolute natural rights or the Wilsonian idea of ever-progressing history…. But let me ask you to consider the consequences. European thinkers have long criticized America for remaining trapped in a Lockean world, with its weak decentralized government and strong individual rights. They say our 18th-century Declaration has prevented us from progressing to higher forms of government.
“Why has America never had a socialist party, one German sociologist famously asked. But we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bounds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx and their followers. Fascism—which, after all, was a national socialism—triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions. The socialism of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China proceeded to kill more tens of millions of their own people. This is what happens when natural rights give way to the higher good of notions of history, progress, or, as Thomas Sowell has written, the ‘visions of the anointed.’
“None of this, of course, was an improvement on the principles of the Declaration. Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” is largely about how America owed its superiority over Europe to its conscious decision to reject central planning and administrative rule root and branch. Progressivism, in other words, is retrogressive. As Calvin Coolidge said on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration:
“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”
“When Abraham Lincoln addressed the assembled crowd at Gettysburg, they had gathered to memorialize the past. But Lincoln’s address urged them to not do so with complacency. Instead, Lincoln said, they would look to the past as inspiration to take them to greater heights in the future.
“It is rather for us,” Lincoln said, “to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation . . . shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government, of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
• Justice Thomas finished by calling us to take courage to stand for what we believe and not be timid, as if our reliance on God rather than the state were somehow shameful. That’s why I’m passing this along.
• My goal here is to emphasize the importance of understanding the human person in the formation or reformation of a nation. Just as we dismiss the founding myth of Rome, we must dismiss the reforming myth of human perfectibility. We may dismiss the progressives, but we must also dismiss all other reformations that rely on a high view of government power. Power is the wrong tool, and governments, while divinely instituted as a means of common grace, are a false substitute for the kingdom of God. We Christians who are overly optimistic about the role of government or ashamed of the truths and obligations of the Scriptures risk making the error of utopianism.
•You can find the video of the entire speech by googling it or at this YouTube link: Bing Videos.