SECOND half of his speech:
legitimacy and authority from our consent; we do not get ours from it.
The primacy of our rights in relation to our government is crucial in reconciling the immortal words of the Declaration with our Constitution and our history. None of our rights come from the government; all of the government’s authority comes from our consent. And, the structure and limited role of government is to assure that it does not exceed the authority that to which we have consented or intrude on our natural rights.
The Constitution is the means of government; it is the Declaration that announces the ends of government. The Constitution achieves this purpose by protecting our natural rights and liberties from concentrated power and excessive democracy. Our Constitution creates a separation of powers and federalism – truly for the first time in modern history – to prevent the government from becoming so strong that it threatens our natural rights. Federalist No. 10 proposed the idea that the great threat to our rights comes from majority faction. Human history teaches us, alas, that numerical majorities frequently seek to control government, and use the state to violate the rights of the minority. Because man is fallen and the desire for power was, as James Madison described it, “sown in the nature of man,” government had to be limited. For, as Madison said, “if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” But men are not angels. The slaveholders used the power of government to deny the fundamental natural rights of the slaves; the segregationists used the state to oppress the freed men and women – including my ancestors.
As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure. At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the 28th President, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism. Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life. It 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.
Progressivism was not native to America. Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired. Progressives like Wilson argued that America needed to leave behind the principles of the Founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated people of Europe. Wilson called Germany’s system of relatively unimpeded state power “nearly perfected.” He acknowledged that it was “a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle,” which “offers none but what are to our minds alien ideas.” He thus described America, still stuck with its original system of government, as “slow to see” the superiority of the European system.
Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement—with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War—to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration. Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident. To Wilson, the inalienable rights of the individual were “a lot of nonsense.” Wilson redefined “liberty” not as a natural right antecedent to the government, but as “the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs and interests.” In other words, liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God, but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government. The government, as Wilson reconceived of it, would be “beneficent and indispensable.” Progressives such as John Dewey attacked the Framers for believing that “their ideas [were] immutable truth good at all times and places,” when instead they were “historically conditioned, and relevant only to their own time.” Now, Dewey and the progressives argued, those ideas were to be repealed.
Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government. 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.
You will not be surprised to learn that the progressives had a great deal of contempt for us, the American people. Before he entered politics, Wilson would describe the American people as “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn,” and “foolish.” He lamented that we “do too much by vote” and too little by expert rule. He proposed that the people be ruled by administrators who use them as “tools.” He once again aspired to be like Germany, where the people, he said admiringly, were “docile and acquiescent.”
The century of progressivism did not go well. The European system that Wilson and the progressives scolded Americans for not adopting, which he called nearly perfect, led to the governments that caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration was based. Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people.
It was a terrible mistake to adopt Progressivism’s rejection of the Declaration’s vision of universal, inalienable natural rights. Wilson’s claim that natural rights must give way to historical progress could justify the greatest mistakes in our history. In Plessy v. Ferguson, my Court upheld Louisiana’s system of racial segregation because “separate but equal,” it observed, was reasonable in light of “the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order.” It comes as no surprise that the Progressives embraced eugenics. Progressives believed that Darwinian science – the idea of ever advancing progress written into biology itself – had proven the inherent superiority and inferiority of the races. It was only a small step for Wilson to resegregate the federal workforce. It was only another step for the government to launch sterilization programs on those deemed by the experts of the day to be unfit to reproduce – upheld by my Court in Buck v. Bell in an opinion written by no less a figure than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
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. Fascism – which, after all, was a national socialism – triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions. The socialism of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China proceeded to kill more tens of millions of their own people. This is what happens when natural rights give way to the higher good of notions of history, progress, or, as Thomas Sowell has written, the “vision of the anointed.”
None of this, of course, was an improvement on the principles of the Declaration. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is largely about how America owed its superiority over Europe to its conscious decision to reject central planning and administrative rule root and branch. Progressivism, in other words, is retrogressive. As Calvin Coolidge said on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration,
If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.
When Abraham Lincoln addressed the assembled crowd at Gettysburg, they had gathered to memorialize the past. But Lincoln’s address urged them to not do so with complacency. Instead, Lincoln said, they would look to the past as inspiration to take them to greater heights in the future. “It is rather for us,” Lincoln said,
to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that this government, of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
As we are gathered to celebrate this 250th anniversary of the Declaration, it may be tempting to do so as if we are passive spectators. It may be tempting to get out our tea and crumpets, treat the Declaration like a shiny object or a keepsake, and listen to the sound of our own voices. We could get into debates over whose conception of the Founding is better, over how we were so much better than the Founders, over what we would do differently. We could be careful to not do anything that exposes us to criticism, costs us friends, or hurts our career prospects.
What we must turn our attention to today is finding in ourselves the same level of courage that the signers of the Declaration had, so that we can do for our future what they did for theirs. Each of you will have opportunities to be courageous every day, whether your calling in life is as a day laborer, a stay-at-home mom, a small business owner, an educator, an office worker, a judge, or a Senator. It may mean speaking up in class tomorrow when everyone around you expects you to live by lies. It may mean confronting today’s fashionable bigotries such as anti-semitism. It may mean standing up for your religion when it is mocked and disparaged by your professors. It may mean not budging on your principles when it will mean losing friends or being ostracized. It may mean running for your school board when you see that they are teaching your children to hate your values and our country. It may mean turning down a job offer that requires you to make moral compromises. One thing I know to be true: It will mean waking up every day with the resolve to withstand unfair criticism and attacks.
These are the choices that will confront you, and you must decide whether to respond with timidity or with courage, as the signers of the Declaration did. It will, of course, not be easy. It never is. But, if, like me, you need a greater source of strength than yourselves, you will need to rely on your faith to guide and sustain you through it. You will disappoint people you thought were friends and endure personal attacks as well as attacks on those you care about.
But, if you stand, you will find that courage, like cowardice, can be habit forming – a part of your life and who you are. And, I may dare say, it is liberating. You will also be a living example for others to emulate.
So by all means, celebrate the Declaration of Independence. It is the most important act in American history, the foundation of our Constitution and, as Lincoln said, “the sheet anchor” of our republic. But, I implore you to celebrate it by standing up for it, by defending it, and by recommitting yourselves to living up to its ideals. Channel the courage of the men who faced down a king and signed it and, or of a President who led the nation in a Civil War rather than permit this house to be divided by the great contradiction of slavery. Take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion.
And, “…with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence…[let us] mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
Thank you, and may God continue to bless this great nation.
This is a lightly edited transcript of a speech delivered by Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, at the University of Texas at Austin on April 15, 2026.
