@TonySeruga
Clarence Thomas — full remarks on progressivism, its foundations, history, and impact from his appearance at University of Texas at Austin:
“Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao were all intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration is based.”
"Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people."
"It comes as no surprise that the progressives embraced eugenics… 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."
“European thinkers have long criticized America for remaining trapped in a Lockean world, with its weakened, decentralized government and strong individual rights. They say our 18th-century Declaration has prevented us from progressing to higher forms of government."
"But we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bonds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx, and their followers. Fascism, which after all was 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 tens of millions more of their own people. This is what happens when natural rights give way to higher-good notions of history or progress, or, as Thomas Sowell has written, the visions 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.”
Thomas, an originalist in constitutional interpretation, sees the progressive approach as incompatible with the Constitution’s design of limited, enumerated powers and a presumption of individual liberty. Critics of his stance argue that progressivism has delivered expansions of liberty (e.g., civil rights advancements, women’s suffrage, regulatory protections) that the original framework alone did not guarantee, and that “rights from government” is a mischaracterization of modern liberalism’s emphasis on positive rights alongside negative ones.
Whether one views Thomas’s warning as prescient or alarmist depends on one’s priors about human nature, the reliability of concentrated state power, and the durability of self-government without a shared moral and philosophical foundation. The speech underscores a persistent tension: America’s experiment rests on a specific anthropology (equal creation, endowed rights) that some philosophies treat as outdated obstacles to progress, while others see as non-negotiable guardrails against tyranny—soft or hard.
https://twitter.com/TonySeruga/status/2044961416034324847