Clarence Thomas Against Progressivism—and Progressives
Thomas singled out Woodrow Wilson—a political scientist, a Progressive, and a Southern Democrat, who, as President, from 1913 to 1921, segregated the civil service and helped create the trendy bureaucratic state, together with the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission. “To Wilson, the unalienable rights of the individual were, quote, a lot of nonsense,” Thomas mentioned. “Wilson redefined liberty not as a natural right attendant and antecedent to the government but as, quote, the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs and interests.” Wilson, Thomas mentioned, “described America still stuck with its original system of government as, quote, slow to see the superiority of the European system,” and noticed the general public as “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, and foolish.”
Thomas went on to hyperlink Progressivism to the worst crimes of the 20 th century. “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 is based,” Thomas mentioned. “Many Progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people.” He warned that the hazard of Progressivism persists to this present day: “Since Wilson’s Presidency, Progressivism has made many inroads into 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.”
Thomas’s account of Progressivism as a malignant drive threatening particular person liberty echoes an argument developed by students on the conservative Claremont Institute. When I requested Charles Kesler, a senior fellow on the institute and the editor of the Claremont Review of Booksin regards to the significance of Thomas’s handle, he invoked Abraham Lincoln’s in 1858, on the existential stakes for a nation riven by slavery. “This is really Thomas’s, in a strange way, his ‘house divided’ speech,” Kesler instructed me. “He doesn’t expect the Union to fall, but he doesn’t expect it to remain half slave and half free permanently. It will become all one or all the other.” Ronald Pestritto, additionally a senior fellow at Claremont and the graduate dean at Hillsdale College, wrote in reward of Thomas’s speech: “The Left doesn’t want us to notice that they preach their core governing vision on a rejection of America’s founding principles, and so they are bound to protest Thomas’s account. Yet his account is dead-on accurate, and for proof one needs only look to the original Progressives, who were open in their disdain of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In this, they “They were far more honest than their present-day cousins.”
Numerous scholars of the Progressive Era with whom I spoke said Thomas had offered up a distorted version of the movement. Nancy Unger, a past president of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and a professor emerita at Santa Clara University, said, “Progressives weren’t excellent, and I do not faux that they have been, however that is such a misrepresentation of who they have been. The driving drive for many Progressives was not that they have been anti-American, not that they have been anti-Declaration of Independence and Constitution, however that they have been saying, ‘Look, this can be a completely different nation than after we began,’ we’re an industrial, city nation, and a whole lot of issues that did not require authorities earlier than achieve this now.’ So to show that into some type of vilification, I simply suppose, is unconscionable.” Christopher Nichols, a historian of the Progressive Era on the Ohio State University, mentioned of Thomas’s account, “It’s a deeply problematic reduction of Progressivism to its most negative elements,” together with racism and help for eugenics. Thomas’s speech, Nichols continued, “absolutely mistakes and conflates figures like Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini as Progressives, none of whom would have defined themselves as such, or were defined in their eras as such.”
Ace Matt Ford famous in The New RepublicWilson provides a handy goal, given an unsightly document of racism that led Princeton, in 2020, to take away his identify from the public-policy college, as an “inappropriate namesake.” But Thomas’s give attention to Wilson misrepresents his position within the Progressive motion. “Presenting Wilson as the inventor of progressivism is historically illiterate, akin to saying that Joseph Stalin invented communism or that Ronald Reagan invented conservatism,” Ford wrote. (Thomas by no means talked about Wilson’s Progressive predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican.) In addition, as John Milton Cooper, Jr., the writer of a 2009 biography of Wilsonidentified, Thomas overstated Wilson’s rejection of pure rights. “Think of this deeply, thoughtfully, intellectually religious man not believing in natural rights—come on, you can’t believe that,” Cooper instructed me. Wilson’s father was a Presbyterian minister, and Wilson learn the Bible day by day.
