By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, April 24, 2026
If you’re bored with hearing me bee-bop and scat on
progressives, you can skip the first part and check in when I mildly criticize
Clarence Thomas himself, or skip all the way to the end when I criticize the
new right.
Last week Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas
gave a speech at the University of Texas (which you can watch here) in
which he denounced, in one way or another, the evils of slavery, Jim Crow,
eugenics, Nazism, and communism. He lionized Justice John Marshall Harlan’s
dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson and harshly criticized the court he sits
on for upholding segregation. He declared forthrightly, and at times movingly,
the idea that all people, regardless of the color of their skin or the
circumstances of their birth, are endowed with dignity and are equal before God
and government.
And a chorus of progressives was
outraged. They mocked him. A writer for Slate said Thomas’ comments were “jaw-dropping” and “cause for
alarm” not least because it was proof that Thomas suffers from “Fox News brain
rot.”
One reason Thomas’ comments infuriated these progressives
is that fury at Thomas is their default mode. But the specific trigger was that
Thomas singled out the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson and his contemporaries
for criticism.
“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the
Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government,” Thomas said.
“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.”
It will surprise no one that I largely agree with Thomas
on this point. I also largely agree with Thomas on the historical facts. Wilson
and many of his fellow traveling progressive intellectuals were openly and
proudly contemptuous of natural rights, and Wilson rejected the idea of fixed
and inalienable rights. “No doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked
about the inalienable rights of the individual,” he wrote in the book Constitutional
Government in the United States, “and a great deal that was mere vague
sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental
principle.”
For Wilson, individual rights were those granted by men
in power through political negotiation. Referring to the line in the
Massachusetts Bill of Rights, “to the end that this may be a government of laws
and not of men,” Wilson retorts, “there never was such a government.” For
Wilson, the purpose and function of the law is the “regulation of the national
life.”
John Dewey, arguably the most influential philosopher of
his era said, “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom
of mythological social zoology.”
In fairness to Dewey—not something I’m known to say—he
did not believe that rights and liberties did not exist. He simply believed
that they were social constructs shaped and protected—i.e., granted—by
government via what he called “social control.”
“In this effort toward a higher morality in our social
relations,” progressive reformer Jane
Addams wrote in Democracy and Social Ethics, “we must demand that the
individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and
shall be content to realize his activity only in connection with the activity
of the many.”
Charles Merriam, the great progressive political
scientist, in A History of American Political Theories credits the
German thinkers and American intellectuals influenced by them for crafting a
new progressive theory of government that left, “The individualistic ideas of
the ‘natural right’ school of political theory, endorsed in the [American]
Revolution … discredited and repudiated.”
I can do this all day. But you get the point. The
progressives of the Progressive Era were honestly and unambiguously
contemptuous of the classically liberal conception of natural, or God-given,
inalienable rights.
They were also highly skeptical of classically liberal
notions of checks and balances and limited government. Wilson rejected the
“mechanistic” design of the Constitution, believing that nation-states were
Darwinian in nature. “Governments are living things and operate as organic
wholes,” he wrote. “The makers of the Constitution constructed the
federal government upon a theory of checks and balances which was meant to
limit the operation of each part and allow to no single part or organ of it a
dominating force; but no government can be successfully conducted upon so
mechanical a theory.”
A great many of them were also fans of eugenics, as
Thomas noted in his speech last week, to the outrage of many. I won’t rehash
the evidence of this, but if you doubt it, just take a gander at Thomas Leonard’s work on the subject. But I will say, to buttress Thomas’
point, that eugenics was not some unrelated side interest to progressives. The
assumptions of eugenics were seen as wholly complementary to the Darwin-infused
idea that nations were akin to organisms.
This doesn’t mean the progressives were all bad people or
cartoon villains. Many progressives were understandably outraged by poverty and
the like. And many of them did extremely valuable and laudable things, from
fighting corruption to fixing bad sanitation systems. And many of them, like
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., thought the smartest way of dealing with poverty was
to sterilize poor people.
The contemporary progressives who are angry at Thomas for
airing this dirty laundry are stuck in a bind. On the one hand, they want to
claim that Thomas is attacking them when he attacks the self-described
progressives of a century ago. On the other hand, contemporary progressives
want to deny that they share the unsavory ideological commitments of those
bygone progressives. I just don’t think this works.
First of all, Thomas didn’t say much, if anything, about
contemporary progressives. The ones claiming Thomas attacked “progressive
politics” are inferring that from his attack on Wilson & Co. Fine. If you
subscribe to the views of Wilson, Dewey, et al., by all means take offense. He
was indeed attacking you. But don’t then also take offense at the suggestion
that you agree with those people about the embarrassing stuff.
Conservatives of my stripe figured out how to do this a
long time ago. When some founders are attacked for their views on slavery, the
mature conservative response is to say, “Yeah, they were wrong about that.”
When people denounce Bill Buckley for some of his early writings on the
segregated South, we say, “Yeah, that was bad. But he matured and changed his
mind.” It’s really not hard.
A thoughtful progressive might listen to what Thomas was
saying about the underlying philosophical assumptions of the early progressives
and ponder whether their own philosophical assumptions require a rethink. Just
because progressives tend to define progressivism as “good people doing the
good things” doesn’t make that definition true. Woodrow Wilson is the guy who
threw political prisoners in jail, censored critics, lamented the Confederacy’s
defeat, and resegregated the federal government. He didn’t think he was
betraying progressivism; he thought he was the living embodiment of it. If
that’s a problem for you, it’s a you problem, not a me problem.
This stuff has been so inside my wheelhouse for so long,
it’s very difficult to resist the urge to just go on autopilot. But I want to
break new ground.
Two-and-a-half cheers
for Clarence Thomas.
So first, I want to offer two criticisms of Thomas’
mostly excellent and utterly defensible speech.
The first has to do with his very, very Claremonty
framing of things. Harry Jaffa was a brilliant, cantankerous guy and the
founder of what has become known as the “West Coast Straussian” school of
thought headquartered at the Claremont Institute. Jaffa believed—with good
reason—that Abraham Lincoln was a moral philosopher who recognized that the
“self-evident” idea that we are endowed with “inalienable rights” was the very
heart of the American creed and our Constitution’s purpose and that slavery was
antithetical to both.
Thomas’ understanding of the Declaration as the mission
statement of government and the Constitution as the user manual in service to
that mission is pure Jaffa-ism. And I’m here for it.
But the problem with Jaffa-ism in the real world is that
Jaffa and many of his students were so smitten with Lincoln’s statesmanship in
a time of crisis—and because Jaffa was obsessed with the power and centrality
of ideas—they tended to think that conflicts over ideas were driving us to yet
more crises. This yielded a kind of apocalypticism that some found hard to keep
in check. A bit like a doomsday cult, every new light in the nighttime sky
aroused an “Okay this is it!” response. This apocalyptic thinking is how we got
“The Flight 93 Election” nonsense, fevered musings about the need for a “Red Caesar,” and John Eastman’s preposterous scheme to
steal the 2020 election.
I hear rhymes and echoes of some of this in Thomas’
speech. I want to be very clear: I don’t think Thomas is calling for anything
remotely like any of that stuff. If there’s one thing we know about Thomas,
it’s that he’s a constitutionalist. But in his speech, Thomas correctly says,
“The ideas of the Declaration were so powerful that our nation could not
coexist with the contradiction created by the great evil of slavery.”
Later on, he says that 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.”
First of all, I don’t think the parallelism, intended or
not, is helpful. Second, I just don’t think this is necessarily true. These
conflicting visions have coexisted for more than 100 years. I agree that the
principles of Wilsonian progressivism are theoretically incompatible with the
Founders’ vision of natural rights. But in the real world, we’ve seen them in
tension—sometimes in a very healthy tension!—not just for a century, but since
the founding. John Adams had some really crappy ideas about the power of the
state. Hamilton wasn’t exactly a laissez-faire classical liberal on economics.
Andrew Jackson was a borderline Red Caesar. Wilson was an outright enemy of the
founding in word and deed. But his tenure ended with Americans rejecting that
stuff. They reembraced it under FDR, which really was the apotheosis of
Wilsonian progressivism.
Since then, Congress and the courts have trimmed many—but
not all—of the excesses of the Progressive Era. It’s been a long and zig-zaggy
process. What it hasn’t been is fuel for a civil war. Progressivism as Thomas
defines it may be very bad and very wrong, but it ain’t slavery. It doesn’t
raise the same fundamental issues. Progressivism surely raises its share of
moral dilemmas and conflicts—from abortion, to euthanasia, to trans issues and
race. I don’t want to minimize these things, because they are serious and
important disagreements. But they are still different and, so far, have been
addressable through politics and law. And in recent years, progressives have
lost on these fronts at least as often as they have won. Roe is gone.
DEI is in retreat, as are racial quotas in higher education. Trans issues are
now widely seen as a liability for Democrats.
The reason the court is visiting the issue of the
independence of the Federal Reserve isn’t driven by anything as morally
consequential as the existence of chattel slavery in a nation dedicated to
human equality. It’s because a power-hungry narcissist thinks he should be able
to control interest rates, and he’s using unitary executive theory to get it.
Maybe the conflict between progressivism and classical
liberalism simply isn’t the binary choice that Jaffa-style intellectuals want
to make it?
Take the word “progressivism” out of it and just call it
“statism.” Thomas is absolutely right that Europe is far more comfortable with
statism than America is. But Europe is full of decent, democratic nations where
it is possible to live in freedom and dignity. They certainly have problems,
and I don’t want their systems. But they aren’t unfree hell holes.
There’s a kind of intellectual who thinks a conflict of
ideas must be mirrored in the real world. But the truth, for good or ill, is
that Americans—like humans generally—routinely live in a world of conflicting
ideas and contradictions of principles. America’s fondness or tolerance for
statism waxes and wanes based on the facts in the real world, not just the
theories on a page. The brilliance of the Constitution, as Thomas eloquently
alluded to in his speech, is that it gives space for people to work out these
conflicts through politics. And politics isn’t war. The point of politics is to
avoid war, through compromise and argument. The point of the Revolutionary War
was to create a new nation where politics, not muskets, settled most questions,
within the guardrails of our Constitution. Politics and argument were
insufficient to the task of resolving the crisis of slavery. But slavery wasn’t
just a crisis of principles; it was a crisis of lived experience in ways
that the problems of progressivism are not. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t be.
But the slope we are on doesn’t look all that slippery to me.
Even the image of a slope is wrong. Progressivism—or
statism—does not move inexorably forward monolithically, never mind inexorably.
If it did, the New Deal would still be intact, as would all of the bad policies
of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The Supreme Court itself has not been
sliding toward progressivism, but inching away from it. There has never been a
court more protective of the First Amendment’s protection of speech and
religion. Roe v. Wade was overturned. Gun rights are more secure than at
any time in living memory. How did that happen? Decades of hard work by the
conservative legal movement in law schools, journals, courts, and elections. In
other words, politics. Progressivism is very strong in some places and in
retreat in others. It was—and shall be—ever thus. The problem with the Flight
93 nonsense was that a bunch of people lost sight of this.
Look, I hate Woodrow Wilson, but the Fed
established under Wilson was a quintessentially progressive idea: a body of
technocratic experts trying to work outside of the political process. And it
has worked remarkably well, coexisting with the constitutional order just fine—in
the real world. The only place it doesn’t work is on paper. That’s not a
trivial thing, but nor is it a crisis. That’s why the court is so reluctant to
ditch it in service to Donald Trump’s selfish agenda.
Indeed, some of the speculation is that, in the words of a writer at Mother
Jones, Thomas “thinks his fellow GOP-appointees are chickening out” when it
comes to overturning Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which limits
the president’s power to fire certain officials. According to this theory,
Thomas was playing the role of Henry V, delivering a St. Crispin’s Day speech
to his colleagues to muster the courage to dismantle the administrative state.
I doubt that was his primary motivation.
On the actual substance of the case—i.e. whether the
court should fully repeal the Fed’s independence in fealty to unitary executive
theory—I am quite torn. But whichever way you come down, I don’t think the
rhetoric of revolutionaries committing to war should decide it.
And that rhetoric is my second quibble.
Thomas says:
When I encounter
the Declaration of Independence anew today, I am most struck by the final
sentence. It can be easy to forget, 250 years later, the courage it took for
those 56 men to sign the Declaration. Arguably, these men committed treason
against the King, risking death at the hands of an empire far mightier than the
newborn United States. They thus concluded with the memorable final sentence:
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the
protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives,
our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.” I will say that again: “we mutually pledge
to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
I am all in favor of fidelity to the Constitution and the
principles of the Declaration, but there is just a huge categorical
difference between the courage and sacrifice required to fight a
revolutionary war against our colonial masters to create a new republic and the
courage and sacrifice required for sustaining a democratic republic governed by
the rule of law. The stakes in the fight over the independent status of federal
agencies—or, for that matter, DEI, trans issues and the rest—do not require
anyone to risk their lives or threaten the lives of anyone else. Again, I don’t
think for a moment that Thomas is calling for that. But I think the rhetoric is
inconsistent with the stakes (however Thomas sees them). America survived lots
of bad Supreme Court rulings, including Plessy. America survived some
progressive presidents empowered by horrible ideas and large majorities in
Congress. Combatting progressivism is a good thing in my books (literally!),
but it is simply not a fight for the nation’s survival the way Thomas seems to
paint it at times.
I hope I have not seemed too critical of Thomas here.
There’s so much in his speech I agree with, and so much in his character and
career I admire.
Thomas from the top
rope.
Which brings me to a final point. You know why I loved
Thomas’ speech? Because whatever aid and comfort he is lending to the
catastrophists of the Flight 93 school, intended or not, his larger argument is
an utter refutation of the new right’s whole schtick.
It doesn’t surprise me that Thomas’ progressive critics
took the bait and beclowned themselves attacking him. What is a little
shocking, however, is how the various national conservatives, integralists,
postliberals, heritage-American fetishists, neo-monarchists, neo-confederates,
and Red Caesarists haven’t said a word in protest. For a decade now, the
intellectual vanguard of these forces has rejected the idea that America is a
creedal nation, and heaped scorn either on the claim that America is an idea or
on that idea itself. And here comes Clarence Thomas laying hot fire on all of
that.
Thomas all but shouts that America is the idea at the
heart of the Declaration. He testifies:
We can argue over
whether you believe in immutable, absolute natural rights or the Wilsonian idea
of ever-progressing history. Indeed, your School of Civic Leadership was
created to host such arguments. 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.
Funny, for years, Yoram Hazony, Patrick Deneen, et al.
have been mocking John Locke and lamenting our captivity in a “Lockean world.”
When Viktor Orbán says,
“Checks and balances is a U.S. invention that for some reason of intellectual
mediocrity Europe decided to adopt,” his amen corner cheers. When Thomas says
checks and balances are a near-sacred lynchpin of the American experiment, we
hear only crickets from that corner. Thomas lays waste to Woodrow Wilson’s
progressivism as antithetical to the American project, but Deneen says it was the inexorable outgrowth of the Founders’
ill-considered liberalism. Sohrab Ahmari and Christopher DeMuth celebrate
Wilson’s taming of the market or his “ardent nationalism.” Thomas says that the Declaration’s
principles, not Wilson’s progressive nationalism nor his socialist instincts,
made America “the freest, wealthiest, and most powerful nation in the history
of the world.”
And yet, we’ve heard no pushback from any of them.
In this context, I feel guilty offering even minor
criticisms of Thomas’ speech. Because when it comes to the big picture, Thomas
is picking fights with all the right people, even if some of them lack the
political courage to fight back.
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