OPINION:
In fewer than 2,000 words Wednesday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas summed up the profound danger that liberalism poses to the United States and the world.
In a speech at the University of Texas at Austin commemorating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Justice. Thomas laid out, in layman’s terms, the fundamental problems with the ideology brought to us, most notably in recent history, by President Wilson.
Justice Thomas detailed for the audience how that philosophy is innately irreconcilable with all that has made America the freest, most immigrated-to country in the world.
“To Wilson … liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God, but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government,” Justice Thomas told a packed auditorium. “Progressivism … holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”
That’s the “Zoolander” trancelike slavishness to all things far left that we see now among college students and members of Generation Z, with their “Free Palestine” tent cities and proclaimed love of socialism, under which they have never lived. They make no bones about wishing to swap freedom for free stuff.
Even the moniker they bestowed on the mayor they elected in New York City, “Mamdaddy,” reveals their ideal government: a parentlike bureaucracy that dictates what the masses may do and when and where. No thinking required.
That’s the real lure of liberalism, after all: the elimination of the need to think for oneself. The movement presumes “the people” can’t do that anyway.
As Justice Thomas said, “Before he entered politics, Wilson would describe the American people as ‘selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn and foolish.’”
Indeed, today’s liberalism — that of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernard Sanders — isn’t just a political affiliation. It’s also a one-stop shop for lifestyle, religion and spirituality. It tells you what to wear (a keffiyeh goes with everything), whom to hate (start with Donald Trump and the Jews) and where to stand on the issues (no borders and abortion right up through labor pains). It is tailor-made for the mindless.
Yet anyone who has bothered to do even light reading about our recent past knows liberalism isn’t something that just needs to be given a chance.
“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,” Justice Thomas said.
“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 are based.”
It was the liberals who brought us the “separate but equal” ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice Thomas told the audience; it was they who “embraced eugenics.”
The movement’s name reveals its adherents’ singular focus on continual change, as if nothing was worthy of preservation. “Wilson’s claim that natural rights must give way to historical progress could justify the greatest mistake in our history,” Justice Thomas said.
This “progress” requires turning “We the People” into the government’s people: lazy, cowardly, coddled individuals, or “passive spectators,” as Justice Thomas called them. That is what we have produced.
It takes enormous intellectual, emotional and spiritual courage to stand up for what is right when the majority says it’s OK to do wrong. Now, especially as we approach our semiquincentennial with so many evidently allergic to personal choice and consequence, it’s what we must all do.
“We could be careful to not do anything that exposes us to criticism, costs us friends or hurts our career prospects,” Justice Thomas concluded. “But in my view, we must find in ourselves that same level of courage that the signers of the Declaration had, so that we can do for our future what they did for theirs.”
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