Clarence Thomas’s – Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas used an address to single out Woodrow Wilson, arguing that Progressivism threatened America’s founding principles. He linked Wilson’s approach to a broader trajectory he described as fatal for individual liberty—invoking f
Woodrow Wilson is a familiar name in American political history. But in Clarence Thomas’s telling, Wilson isn’t just a former president with complicated legacies—he’s a starting point for something Thomas portrays as a long slide away from liberty.
Thomas singled out Wilson, describing him as a political scientist and a Progressive who served as president from 1913 to 1921. Thomas said Wilson segregated the civil service and helped create what he called the modern bureaucratic state. including the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission.
Then Thomas delivered the pivot that shaped the entire argument. “To Wilson, the unalienable rights of the individual were, quote, a lot of nonsense,” Thomas said. Thomas continued: “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.”.
Thomas said Wilson also painted the United States as behind. “Wilson described America still stuck with its original system of government as. quote. slow to see the superiority of the European system. ” Thomas said. He added that Wilson saw the public as “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, and foolish.”.
Thomas’s warning did not stay at the level of ideas. He linked Progressivism, as Wilson practiced it and as Progressives advanced it, to the worst crimes of the twentieth 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. ” Thomas said. He named Stalin. Hitler. Mussolini. and Mao and described them as “intertwined with the rise of Progressivism. ” adding that they “were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration are based.”.
Thomas then argued that admiration for these leaders was not distant or abstract. “Many Progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people.”
From there, Thomas warned that the danger is not historical. “Since Wilson’s Presidency. Progressivism has made many inroads into our system of government and our way of life. ” Thomas said. He added 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.”.
The thrust of Thomas’s speech, in other words, is a single storyline: Progressivism, through its redefinition of liberty and its attraction to European-style systems, becomes not just a political alternative but a threat.
That argument echoes an approach developed by scholars at the conservative Claremont Institute. where Charles Kesler. a senior fellow and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books. connected Thomas’s remarks to an older political showdown. Kesler invoked Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 “house divided” speech. “This is really Thomas’s, in a strange way, his ‘house divided’ speech,” Kesler told 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. also a senior fellow at Claremont and the graduate dean at Hillsdale College. praised Thomas’s speech in terms that cast the debate as fundamentally about whether governing visions can reject America’s founding principles. Pestritto wrote in praise of Thomas’s speech: “The Left doesn’t want us to notice that they predicate 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 need only look to the original Progressives. who were open in their disdain of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In this, they were far more honest than their present-day cousins.”.
But the speech also drew immediate pushback from scholars of the Progressive Era, many of whom said Thomas’s version collapses complexity into a set of villains.
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. called Thomas’s depiction a misrepresentation. “Progressives were not perfect. and I don’t pretend that they were. but this is such a misrepresentation of who they were. ” Unger said. She argued that the main drive for many Progressives wasn’t anti-Americanism or hostility to the Declaration and Constitution. “The driving force for most Progressives was not that they were anti-American. not that they were anti-Declaration of Independence and Constitution. but that they were saying. ‘Look. this is a different nation than when we started. we’re an industrial. urban nation. and a lot of things that didn’t require government before do so now.’ So to turn that into some kind of vilification. I just think. is unconscionable.”.
Christopher Nichols. a historian of the Progressive Era at Ohio State University. described Thomas’s account as “a deeply problematic reduction of Progressivism to its most negative elements. ” pointing to racism and support for eugenics. Nichols said Thomas’s speech also “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.”.
The disagreement is partly about what Thomas selects—and what he assumes. Matt Ford. as he wrote in The New Republic. argued that Wilson is a convenient target because of a record of racism. Ford pointed to the fact that Princeton. in 2020. removed Wilson’s name from the public-policy school as an “inappropriate namesake.” Ford said Thomas’s focus on Wilson misrepresents Wilson’s role in the Progressive movement. writing: “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 also noted that Thomas never mentioned Wilson’s Progressive predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican. “Theodore Roosevelt” doesn’t just change a name in this dispute—it changes who counts as an origin point for the movement Thomas wants readers to fear.
Other scholars raised a more direct challenge to Thomas’s factual framing about natural rights. John Milton Cooper. Jr. the author of a 2009 biography of Wilson. told me Thomas overstated Wilson’s rejection of natural rights. “Think of this deeply. thoughtfully. intellectually religious man not believing in natural rights—come on. you can’t believe that. ” Cooper said. Cooper added a personal and spiritual detail meant to undermine Thomas’s reading: Wilson’s father was a Presbyterian minister. and Wilson read the Bible daily.
What hangs over the entire exchange is the meaning of the evidence Thomas chose. Thomas’s speech ties modern bureaucracy and a European-style political model to a redefinition of liberty. then leaps from that shift to a line that culminates in the twentieth century’s mass violence. Critics say the leap is the problem—whether in who is labeled Progressive. how natural rights are portrayed. or whether Wilson becomes a stand-in for a broader movement he didn’t invent.
By the end of the arguments, the debate is not only about Woodrow Wilson. It is about whether a political philosophy can be judged fairly by its most damning examples—or whether it is being reduced until its defenders are forced to accept a portrait they say never fully fits.
Clarence Thomas Woodrow Wilson Progressivism natural rights Supreme Court Federal Reserve Federal Trade Commission civil service segregation Stalin Hitler Mussolini Mao historians Claremont Institute