Commentary
Earlier this year, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas delivered a speech in Texas in which he warned of an existential threat to the revolutionary principles that animated the birth of our republic. Those principles, articulated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution, are these: that all men are created equal, that rights are inherent in the individual and not something bestowed by government, and that the primary purpose of government is to uphold those rights impartially.
Unfortunately, some time in the second century of the life of our country, millions of Americans underwent a profound, seismic attitude shift. Seduced by an ideology and political movement that became known as progressivism, Americans embraced a vision of government that is fundamentally incompatible with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and ultimately our freedom and way of life. Thomas related how progressives favor rule by experts—government-led social engineering—and believe that those experts are so much wiser and more enlightened than the masses of citizens, that their brilliant plans should not be thwarted by outdated beliefs about individual rights.
In his speech, Thomas didn’t go so far as to describe with what actual practices and policies progressivism began to undermine the Declaration’s principles of inalienable individual rights, the equality of all before the law, and the Constitution that was meant to uphold those principles, so I will address that now.
As I have written before, the philosophy of progressivism was imbued with a spirit of “meliorism”—the doctrine that one of the purposes of government is to improve the economic well-being of citizens by giving them financial assistance. The Founding Fathers were decidedly not meliorists. In blunt, unmistakable language, James Madison, a principal architect of the Constitution and our fourth president, declared, “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” The founders weren’t anti-charity; they just believed that charity belongs properly to the private sector.
In the late 19th century, President Grover Cleveland reiterated the Founders’ vision of limited government, writing in a veto message that there is no constitutional authority for the federal government to bail out a select group of citizens at a time of need and that “though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.”
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