Clarence Thomas’s Birthday Gift to America

Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has a pretty good claim on the title of the greatest living American. The life he has lived, and the work he has done and continues to do, tell a story of how American ideals can shape an American life and enable a man to rise from oppression into freedom and then commit himself to lifting others too. And Justice Thomas has always been remarkably aware of how his life has been shaped by those ideals, and by his devotion to them. His patriotism is deeply learned but it is not fundamentally intellectual. It is rooted in the conviction that the hardest thing about applying your principles in practice is the applying, not the principles—it is the courage to act on what you understand to be true. This was the theme of the extraordinary lecture Thomas delivered a few days ago at the University of Texas at Austin. Reprinted here by our friends at the Civitas Institute, this is really a lecture you should read or watch . It has gotten some critical attention because Thomas criticizes the counter-constitutional ideas of some of the original progressives, particularly as embodied by Woodrow Wilson. He’s right about those, and I think his critics (who can’t really deny what he says about Wilson) are wrong to see that critique as simply on attack on the contemporary left. The people who call themselves progressives now are actually much less coherent in their views than Wilson was. They probably don’t have a worked out constitutional (or counter-constitutional) vision at all, and so it isn’t really clear if they’re wrong in the way that Woodrow Wilson was or not, and Justice Thomas doesn’t really speak to that question one way or another. He criticizes opponents of the fundamental premises of the American political tradition. There are certainly some such opponents on today’s left, but there are also more than there used to be on the right, and I take Thomas to be answering all of them. But above all, he addresses himself to people who accept those premises of the American tradition. To those who agree that we are all created equal but fail to see what demands that makes on them, he argues that we should never underestimate how demanding our national ethos always is, and should never imagine that it doesn’t require our defense of it. And to those who agree that we are all created equal but insist that the American founders and the government they constructed did not really share that commitment in practice, Thomas insists that they are wrong to see the tension between principle and practice as a debilitating hypocrisy. On the contrary, he says, that tension turned out to be an inextinguishable wellspring of political energy for positive change. He said: The ideas of the Declaration were so powerful that our nation could not coexist with the contradiction created by the great evil of slavery. Those principles were so powerful that hundreds of thousands of Americans fought and died in the Civil War to make men free. Those ideas have been so powerful that they convinced our nation to finally end segregation. They continue to be so powerful today that they have inspired people throughout the world to throw off the shackles of their oppressors. That happened, he argued, because enough Americans genuinely believed in those fundamental truths, and were willing to make the sacrifices necessary for that devotion to matter. This is really the theme of his lecture: the necessity of courage moved by devotion. And it is at the core of what he implores Americans to remember in this 250th year of our nation’s life. “So by all means,” he says at end of his remarks, 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. In those final words, as in so much of his public thought, words, and actions, Justice Thomas echoes Abraham Lincoln. And echoes aren’t coincidences. If you think there is no worthy public rhetoric anymore, you’re only almost right. Do yourself a favor and read Justice Thomas’s lecture. The post Clarence Thomas’s Birthday Gift to America appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .