By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, April 27, 2026
“But progressives only believe in nice things!”
Thus went up the cry from the very dumbest and laziest
corners of American public life after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
gave a personally moving—and, as a matter of fact, entirely unobjectionable—speech at the University of Texas in which he outlined two
sets of principles and assumptions competing for dominance in our political
culture: the ideas spelled out in the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago
and those introduced during the Progressive Era about a century ago.
Justice Thomas gives a speech about Woodrow Wilson and
Otto von Bismarck, and we get a howling chorus of partisan clods who apparently
think he was talking about James Talarico—or Thurgood Marshall.
Erwin Chemerinsky is no buffoon, but—if the suits will
forgive me for training my guns in-house here—his account on SCOTUSblog was typical of the
problem: “Thomas suggests that the country began to go wrong early in the 20th
century with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. It is true that Wilson
considered himself a progressive. But, on race issues, he was among our least
progressive presidents, barring Black individuals from the federal civil
service.”
It is not the case that Wilson merely “considered himself
a progressive.” It is the case that Wilson was, in his time, the single most
powerful and consequential leader in the progressive movement in the United
States of America. As Justice Thomas explained—and the point is hardly
controversial among historically literate people—Wilson despised the principles
of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, preferring instead a
government of relatively unfettered “scientific” expertise. There was a
Progressive Party, whose most successful presidential candidate—maybe you’ve
heard of Teddy Roosevelt—was an unapologetic white supremacist who believed that the majority of African Americans in the
South were “wholly unfit for the suffrage.” His vice presidential candidate was
the California governor who signed the Alien Land Law of 1913, designed to
prohibit Asian immigrants (who already were legally excluded from naturalizing
as citizens) from owning land in California. Wilson, the godfather of American
progressivism, did not merely accept preexisting racial segregation in the
federal government but imposed it on the federal work force where it did
not already exist.
Wilson was not alone in this tendency. Progressive hero
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put the Supreme Court’s imprimatur on forced
sterilization for eugenic purposes in Buckv.Bell and was supported in this by the progressive heroine Margaret Sanger.
Soon after, the New Deal coalition was built on the support of progressive
elected officials, mainly members of the Democratic Party, who backed Franklin
Roosevelt on progressive priorities such as business regulation, political
steering of the economy, welfare spending, etc., and who also were committed
segregationists. You do not have to take that from me or from Jonah
Goldberg—you can take it from Ta-Nehisi Coates or from any decent history book.
There were people called progressives and even
Progressives. There was a Progressive Movement and a Progressive Era and a
Progressive Party. Their racism was not incidental to their
progressivism—their racism was rooted in their progressivism, a
philosophy that insisted its adherents should merely “follow the science,”
which, at the time, sometimes meant following it to a forced sterilization
clinic or a concentration camp. It was during the Progressive Era that racism and
antisemitism evolved from mere prejudices rooted in tradition and religion to
rationalistic projects based on pseudoscience that successfully passed for
science for a very long time. To insist that what the progressives said and did
is somehow separate from that which is progressive is simply to define away
that which is inconvenient in the history of a movement and its ideas. This is
some rank “no true Scotsman” stuff. It would be like saying that William F.
Buckley Jr. was one of the “least conservative” commentators on race in his
1957 defense of Southern segregation because, after all, conservatives believe
in colorblind policy and equality under the law—I somehow doubt that
Chemerinsky would let that pass.
In any case, maybe don’t lecture the Supreme Court
justice who grew up barefoot and Gullah-speaking and poor and black under the
bootheel of segregation in Georgia as though this kind of trivial response
were a refutation to his informed views about living under the bootheel of
segregation in Georgia and the ways in which that segregation was incompatible
with our founding ideals. Justice Thomas spoke movingly about the kitchen-table
conversation he had with his grandparents in 1955 when they took over
responsibility for raising him and his brother. Think about what it took for
Clarence Thomas to go from that kitchen table in 1955 to the Supreme Court and
how that shaped the justice’s view of the Declaration of Independence and its
most famous sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.”
The high ideals and the facts on the ground were
irreconcilable, not merely as a political matter but also as a theological one.
“That proposition was not debatable and was beyond the power of man to alter,”
Thomas said. “Others, with power and animus, could treat us as unequal, but
they lacked the divine power to make us so.” That American practice was (and
is) at odds with the fundamental American claims about the nature of man and
society is not something Clarence Thomas dreamed up: Abraham Lincoln saw things
that way, too. So did Thomas Jefferson.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for our modern
progressives to grapple with these notions. Paul Waldman, writing at MS NOW,
thundered that Thomas “doesn’t understand democracy,” while engaging with almost
nothing of the argument Thomas actually put forward. Heather Digby Parton
insisted that the speech was “jaw-dropping and cause for alarm,” and not only that but
“dishonest and dangerous,” at least according to the subheadline. Robert Reich
sneered that the speech was “pure rubbish,” particularly in its connection of
progressive ideology with Italian fascism—which is a matter of well-documented historical fact.
It surely is the case that many people who call
themselves progressives today have ideas different from those of the people who
called themselves progressives in 1916, just as it is true that many people who
call themselves conservatives today—or who called themselves conservatives in
October 2016, at any rate—have many ideas that are different from those who
called themselves conservatives in 1950. But in much the same way that the
modern conservative movement remains characterized by some of the same virtues
and many of the same vices as its postwar expression, the modern progressive
movement remains in thrall to the worst of its intellectual inheritance, i.e.,
the notion that politics can be superseded by science or by more general
expertise, for example that fundamentally political questions about abortion,
sexuality, or climate can be “settled” as though they were matters of
scientific finding rather than matters of priorities, preferences, and
trade-offs. Outside of a few elite law schools and the occasional snotty gaggle
of blued-eyed undergraduates with keffiyehs and Palestinian flags, modern
progressivism has given up its antisemitism, and “scientific” racism mainly has
been relegated to the shadows, but the underlying intellectual defect
connecting these and many other progressive errors—a profound lack of
epistemic humility—remains very much at work, tirelessly so.
That the Bill of Rights enshrines freedom of speech, of
the press, and of religion and puts these rights beyond the reach of mere
temporary democratic majorities is one expression, among many, that the
founders expected the political life of our republic to be one marked by
constant, profound, fundamental disagreement. We have divided powers,
checks and balances, and the rest of it because ours is a political life of
constant negotiation and constant revision. We have a government organized
around our “unalienable rights” because our republic is based on the theological
premise, spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, that all men were
endowed by our Creator with such rights, which are not the gift of any prince,
potentate, or parliament. The progressive error is the belief that the tension
of permanent negotiation can be resolved by taking proper recourse to science
and expertise, along with the consequent belief that society can be directed
under something like the principles that Frederick Winslow Taylor—an
inspirational figure for the progressive movement—put forward for the
management of factories and industrial processes. Of course science and
expertise play a vital role in both public and private life and contribute to
our national affairs—but the question of how to live together in peace and
prosperity is not an algebra problem and the solution is not to be found in a
test tube or AI analysis.
There is an ongoing debate about what progressivism means
now and what it meant in the past, including during the Progressive Era. But it
does mean something, and, whatever that is, it isn’t “nice things for nice
people.” Justice Thomas’s argument deserves better than that.
So does Justice Thomas.
If he will forgive the unflattering comparison, Justice
Thomas is something like Ahab out there with his harpoon well sharpened on the
hunt for the monstrous white whale–and these guppies, surely the most
self-important guppies in piscatory history, think he is interested in them.
Disclosures
I don’t know whether I need to do this every time I
mention Clarence Thomas, but: I know him a little bit and have had the pleasure
of spending some time with him, and we have friends in common, notably Harlan
Crow, who is an investor in The Dispatch and, much more important, a
cherished friend of mine.
And Furthermore
Speaking of the Supreme Court and the need for better
enemies: Holy smokes, that New York Times report about the so-called
shadow docket is just absolutely incompetent journalism. Sarah Isgur does her
best not to make David French squirm too much as his employers are roasted, but
Advisory Opinions has the Times’ number on this one.
Economics for English Majors
Here is an interesting development, from the Wall
Street Journal:
At David’s Bridal, the country’s
largest wedding-dress retailer, more brides are starting to shop for their
dresses about 45 days before their wedding, compared with the company’s
traditional five- to six-month shopping window, said Chief Executive Kelly
Cook. And rush orders, with a turnaround within four weeks of a wedding, are up
50% in the last two years, she said. The company is paying for overtime for its
more than 3,000 alteration specialists as needed to meet the demand.
Can you guess what is driving the change in the timeline? The lawyers know!
When Nicole Hamilton found the
A-line gown she plans to wear to her wedding reception, she requested a waist
roughly 3 inches smaller than her frame.
Hamilton, a product designer in
New York, has lost roughly 50 pounds on weight-loss medications in the past few
years—including 15 pounds since her fiancé popped the question last May. And
she plans to lose more.
But when she went to buy her
dress, she ran into a less-than-thrilling hurdle: She had to sign a legal
waiver, acknowledging in writing that the gown didn’t yet fit.
I myself am curious about how Ozempic et al. will change
Americans’ car-buying habits and how—or whether and when—this will change car
designs. I don’t have anything other than anecdotal observation to back it up,
but I get the feeling that your median Yukon XL-driver body and your median
Miata-driver body are very different.
Words About Words
Item the first: Donald Trump, famously, has the “best
words.” One of them is f—k.
Item the second: “Trump’s political headwinds pile up after a week of setbacks,”
says the Washington Post headline. Work piles up. Wrecked cars on the
freeway pile up. The @#$%&***! wind doesn’t pile up. If you can’t handle a
metaphor, it’s best to leave it in the holster.
Item the third: The Wall Street Journal writes
about Barack Obama’s “gerrymandering pivot,” in which the president “backs efforts he once opposed.” When is it a pivot, and when is it a flip-flop?
It’s a flip-flop when you don’t like the guy, in much the same way that one
man’s principled advocate is another man’s ideologue, that
there’s a world of difference between my pragmatism and your opportunism,
etc. I don’t much like the use of the word pivot in this way, inasmuch as pivot
implies the existence of a central point around which the wheel turns. If
Barack Obama has a central point other than a firm belief in his own
transcendent greatness, I still don’t know what it is.
Not
that he’s in the wrong on the issue here.
In Closing
All dumbasses are presumed innocent until found guilty in a
court of law:
A man was arrested in Pulaski
County after a vehicle fire led to the discovery of over 100 propane tanks that
were not his, Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office said.
…
Authorities said during the
investigation, they found that a man was in the process of stealing two
500-gallon propane tanks from the facility when a valve on one of the tanks
dislodged, which resulted in propane escaping the tank. The fire started in the
engine of the truck, which was parked in the middle of the facility, surrounded
by other propane tanks. The suspect left the scene before first responders
arrived.
The sheriff’s office said they
identified the suspect as 41-year-old Brett Compton. Search and arrest warrants
were then executed at his residence, where 131 propane tanks were found that
did not belong to Compton.
I used to say that there were people who would steal
anything that was not actually nailed down—until I read about people stealing church roofs (for the copper and lead), at
which point I had to revise and widen my assessment. There is a part of me that
wants to be sympathetic: Think of the state to which a man’s life must be
reduced before he turns to ripping off metal from construction sites to sell
for scrap prices. Another part of me notes that we human beings have something
like 70 percent of our DNA in common with piranhas—and we damned well act like
it.
There’s a real contest going on in there. When I watched
Clarence Thomas’s speech, I wondered to myself: How does this guy not hate
his country? The segregationists would have kept Thomas poor and barefoot down
in Georgia if they had had their way, and the nice progressives have worked
tirelessly to obstruct and humiliate him since he became a consequential public
figure. I have pretty mixed feelings about my country, and my life has been
relatively easy. Justice Thomas must be much more of a patriot than I am, I
think, and more of a humanitarian. Maybe I just have a smaller and meaner soul.
But, then again, maybe I just shouldn’t take things so personally. From time to
time, people ask me about my views on immigration, and my usual answer is: I’m
thinking about it.
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