The easiest way to misunderstand Justice Clarence Thomas’s recent speech at the University of Texas is as a conventional swipe at contemporary progressives. His target was instead deeper and older: the capital-P Progressive challenge to the American Founding itself.
Appearing in Austin as part of a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas framed the issue as one of first principles. “The Constitution is the means of government,” he said, and “it is the Declaration that announces the ends of government.”
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Indeed, the American system is bigger than mere elections or policy outcomes. It’s defined by a moral claim about human equality and natural rights, and by a constitutional structure designed to secure them.
Thomas’s critics seem eager to collapse his argument into today’s partisan disputes. They miss the broader view of his speech, with its focus on the long intellectual revolt against the Declaration’s premises and the Constitution’s architecture. As Thomas put it, “At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream.” Its leading apostle was Woodrow Wilson, and the movement was progressivism.
Since then, Thomas said, progressivism has “coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration.” Because it’s opposed to those principles, “it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”
The original Progressives really did reject the Founding’s understanding of liberty, rights, and constitutional structure. Wilson proposed more than modernizing technical improvements around the edges. He argued for a different theory of government, based on his study of German bureaucracy.
That view dates back to his 1887 journal article “The Study of Administration,” where he insisted that “administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics,” and that “Administrative questions are not political questions.” He praised expert administration as distinct from ordinary constitutional politics and suggested that Montesquieu did not “say the last word” on the distribution of authority—meaning there was more to governance than checks and balances.
Thomas summarized the point bluntly. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government,” he said. “It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government.”
That gets to the heart of the matter: a dispute over the nature of rights, not merely whether the government should act here or there. If rights are granted only by positive law, then liberty becomes contingent and revocable—and ultimately political.
And structure is where that dispute cashes out. The Progressives regarded separation of powers, federalism, and bicameralism as mere impediments to enlightened administration. The New Deal accelerated that tendency, consolidating policymaking and enforcement inside sprawling agencies that would’ve struck the Framers as a dangerous concentration of power.
Thomas was thus right to make an argument about regime-level principles. A country that forgets the Declaration’s account of man and government will not preserve the Constitution’s structure for long. Why bother, after all, with rival institutions, limited jurisdictions, and procedural friction if rights come from benevolent experts rather than from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”?
That’s why the speech also matters given the increasingly fevered speculation over possible Supreme Court retirements. Justice Thomas turns 78 in June, while Justice Samuel Alito turned 76 earlier this month. Both men are at the top of their game, enjoying more influence than they’ve ever had—as the most senior associate justices, with Thomas set to become the longest-serving justice in history if he stays through May 2028. Neither has indicated a desire to leave and, while they’re aware of the crass political calculus, Republicans are still narrowly favored to keep the Senate in this fall’s midterms.
But the actuarial tables underscore what’s at stake. A hypothetical replacement needs to be not just smart, credentialed, and temperamentally suited for the high court. He or she needs to understand our constitutional order: that government exists to secure pre-political rights, and that constitutional structure is itself a guarantor of liberty. The late Justice Antonin Scalia captured the point memorably: “Every tinhorn dictator in the world today has a bill of rights. It isn’t the Bill of Rights that produces freedom. It’s the structure of government that prevents anybody from seizing all the power.”
Justice Thomas’s Austin speech was a reminder of that forgotten truth. The American Founding was a claim about human nature, political power, and the institutions needed to keep freedom alive. Any successor worthy of his seat should understand that, too.