Recently at UT-Austin, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke as part of the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. Thomas understands what too many in our day have forgotten: that the Declaration is, as Abraham Lincoln put it, the “apple of gold,” and the Constitution is the picture of silver framed around it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.
Here’s what he means: Justice Thomas reminds us that the Constitution is the means of government; the Declaration announces its ends or purposes. Those ends are plain; governments are instituted to secure the natural rights with which we are endowed by our Creator—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All human beings are created equal in this respect. No majority, no expert, no administrator may vote or decree those rights away.
The Framers gave us separation of powers and federalism precisely because human beings are not angels. As Madison wrote in Federalist 10, and as Lincoln argued in his famous debates with Stephen Douglas, the great danger to liberty is the tyranny of majority faction. Slaveholders once used the power of government to deny the rights of the enslaved; segregationists later did the same. Both ignore the fact that rights precede government. They are not gifts from the state, to be adjusted at its pleasure.
Yet Thomas warns—rightly—that a new philosophy, “progressivism,” has entered our bloodstream. It came not from our soil but from the state-centric doctrines of Otto Von Bismarck’s Germany. American progressives, such as Woodrow Wilson and his fellows, openly dismissed the Declaration as “of no consequence to us.” For them, liberty is whatever the governed permit government to grant them, Moreover, the people are too selfish and ignorant for self-rule; hence, expert administrators should wield power unhindered by parchment barriers or the popular vote. They labeled the Founders’ truths “historically conditioned,” fit only for their own age, and therefore fit to be repealed by the march of “progress.”
For Thomas and Lincoln, this is not advancement; it is regression. Lincoln opposed Stephen Douglas when the latter claimed that the Western territories could vote slavery either up or down, as though right and wrong were subject only to local ballot. Progressivism repeats the same error—but on a grander scale. It substitutes “progressive history” for nature, and the “vision of the anointed” for “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Wilson admired Germany’s “nearly perfected” state, but his heirs watched as that model, stripped of natural-rights doctrine, produced the tyrannies of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Mao. Each denied the self-evident equality of human beings. Each replaced consent of the governed with the iron will of the administrator. Each slaughtered millions in the name of a higher historic good.
We see in Thomas’s words the same warning Lincoln gave at Gettysburg. The dead did not die so that we, their beneficiaries, might grow complacent. They gave the last full measure of devotion that this nation—”conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”—might live. It is for us, the living, said Lincoln, to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us—to take increased devotion to that cause. A new birth of freedom is still required, but not by trading our Lockean, natural-rights inheritance for the speculations of Karl Marx, but by returning to the fountain that nourished the American Revolution.
Calvin Coolidge, speaking on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration, declared its truths final—in other words, absolute truths: equality, inalienable rights, and government by consent. No advance, he said, can be made beyond these propositions; to deny them is to move, not forward, but backward. Lincoln adds his voice from the grave. In 1861, he declared, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” Justice Thomas carries the same devotion.
To this generation, Lincoln and Thomas say, do not be seduced by the illusion of ever-“progressing” history. European critics once mocked us for remaining trapped in an 18th-century world of limited government and strong individual rights. They urged us to “catch up.” We were fortunate not to listen. Socialism and its national variant, fascism, brought only chains and graves. The century of progressivism did not deliver the utopia Wilson promised; it delivered the most awful slaughter the world has seen—ever.
Let’s therefore also resolve, as Lincoln urged at Gettysburg, that these dead shall not have died in vain. Let us resolve that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Justice Thomas has spoken plain truth on our 250th anniversary. We must heed his call to return to the Declaration. We must recommit to its self-evident truths, for in such recommitment lies the only true progress America has ever known, or ever will.