Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Thursday at the University of Texas at Austin that progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and the American form of government. He said it rests on the idea that rights and dignity come not from God but from government.
Thomas opened by invoking Thomas Jefferson’s line in the Declaration that people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. He said the words were self-evident, but only because they were spoken in a world where the opposite was plain to see: In segregated America, governments enforced unequal treatment, and the source of rights could not plausibly be those same governments. “When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that promoted unequal treatment,” he said, “it was obvious that your rights or your dignity did not come from those governments, but rather from God.”
The speech fit a long-running Republican argument that rights are rooted in nature and God rather than in the state. It also landed at a moment when Thomas and his conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court are in the process of destroying one of the key pillars of voting-rights protections, the Voting Rights Act, a contrast that sharpened the force of his message. The nation was not delivered from Jim Crow by a divine light of heaven, but by government, democratic pressure and the people who worked tirelessly to change the laws and force courts, legislatures and the executive branch to join their cause.
That history is the part Thomas left out. Few citizens anywhere were guaranteed their supposedly God-given rights until a mere 250 years ago, and it would be almost 200 years more before those rights were truly available to all Americans. That makes his critique of progressivism less a neutral reading of American history than a declaration of where he thinks the country should look for its rights now: not to government at all, even after government helped make those rights real.
The same argument was on display in 2012, when Paul Ryan said that even presidents need reminding that rights come from nature and God, and not from government. Thomas’s speech took that claim further, tying it directly to a criticism of modern progressivism and to an old constitutional question that is still being fought in court and in politics: whether rights are bestowed by power, or protected from it.