The Shifting and Regressive Nature of Progressivism
“If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress, can be made beyond these propositions.”
In a rare public address marking the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that progressivism is fundamentally incompatible with America’s founding philosophy. He remarked that progressivism rejects natural rights and replaces them with government‑granted rights.
Justice Thomas warned that America is losing the devotion necessary to preserve its founding principles and that progressivism “seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government.”
Analyzing the speech for The Daily Signal, Tyler O’Neil criticized progressivism as a mainstream American political movement that openly opposed the principles of the Declaration. Progressivism, O’Neil argued, constitutes a rival founding philosophy; it does not perfect the American experiment but repudiates its moral foundation.
To better understand the dangers of progressivism, it is helpful to revisit its origins and political evolution. Progressivism denies that human rights are inherent, God‑given, or natural. Instead, it treats rights as contingent and malleable—products of history, experts, and administrative discretion.
The emphasis shifts accordingly: from rights as limits on government power to government as the source, manager, and enforcer of rights. This inversion strikes at the core of the Founders’ vision.
Progressivism emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries amid rapid industrialization, urbanization, and social upheaval. Early progressives were deeply skeptical of mass democracy, laissez‑faire markets, and what they regarded as the rigidity of an eighteenth‑century constitutional order. They considered the system designed by the Founders suitable for a small agrarian republic and not for a powerful industrial nation.
Some early progressives openly espoused illiberal and profoundly anti‑American ideas, such as eugenics, censorship, and rule by centralized experts. They viewed the state not as a neutral entity constrained by constitutional limits but as a civilizing instrument charged with reshaping citizens and perfecting society. Early progressivism owed far more to European statism than to the classical liberal and conservative traditions from which the American system emerged.
Progressivism represented initially a philosophical rather than a political shift. Progressives rejected the Founders’ insistence on permanent natural rights and constitutional limits. They advanced instead an evolutionary view of politics in which law, rights, and institutions must continually adapt.
Progressivism is now nearly synonymous with leftism, but this worldview was not always clearly aligned with the political Left. Nevertheless, it was consistently antithetical to basic conservative and libertarian principles, such as innate rights and liberties, economic freedom, and a limited government.
The early progressives were technocratic statists rather than socialists obsessed with class struggle. They sought efficiency, order, and national strength, not the liberty the Founders envisioned. Progressivism appealed to both Republican and Democratic administrations, as it advocated strong national leadership and adopted a pragmatic rather than ideological language.
The New Deal marked a decisive turn toward leftism. Under the pressure of economic crisis, the progressive vision of expert governance expanded dramatically. Federal power grew, administrative agencies proliferated, and newly asserted economic “rights”—to assistance, protection, and regulation—began to rival traditional negative liberties.
Liberty was dangerously redefined not as freedom from government coercion but as security delivered by government action. What began as a managerial reform movement devolved into a redistributive and interventionist project. This paralleled the Left’s usurpation of liberalism.
In the subsequent decades, progressivism absorbed increasingly egalitarian and cultural ambitions, aligning itself with the “social justice” and identity politics movements. Today, it appears unmistakably left‑wing, especially since the modern globalist Left has become synonymous with technocratic elites rather than a working-class movement.
Progressivism is driven not by genuine compassion for the disadvantaged but by an abiding faith in centralized authority administered by self‑anointed experts. It consistently dismisses the power of voluntary charity, civil society, and free cooperation—institutions that have proven far more humane, flexible, and effective at alleviating suffering than government programs.
The deepest problem with progressivism is not change itself. Human flourishing depends on innovation and improvement. The real danger lies in the deterministic belief that progress is inevitable and morally self‑justifying—and in the conviction that the Founders’ principles are obsolete.
Progressivism treats the Declaration and the Constitution as “living” documents, endlessly malleable to transient prejudices rather than as enduring statements of universal truths. Justice Thomas, following the Founders, quoted President Calvin Coolidge, who warned against this temptation.
“If all men are created equal, that is final,” Coolidge said 100 years ago. “If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress, can be made beyond these propositions.”
To deny their truth, Coolidge concluded, is not to move forward but backward—away from liberty, and away from the moral clarity that made self‑government possible in the first place. Progressivism becomes regressive when it rejects the permanence and unparalleled achievements of the American founding ideals.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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Comments
” Analyzing the speech for The Daily Signal, Tyler O’Neil criticized progressivism as a mainstream American political movement that openly opposed the principles of the Declaration” That is because ‘progressivism’ is nothing more than 21st century communism in a new wardrobe and make up.
A curiously old warning, 1Cor15:55-56 (NASB)
55 O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” 56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law;
pick your translation, they all get to sin manipulates law as power.
The disconnect/division between those who embrace the founding documents, the founding Fathers (including their many flaws), the basic principles/philosophy of Western Civilization and those who reject them or seek to use/exploit them just long enough to gain power or wield them as weapons to throw out our traditions/culture and Constitutional order and replace it with their preferred system is growing more stark. Frankly I am pessimistic the divide can be bridged b/c increasingly our opponents openly seek power to subjugate the rest of us. A National divorce may be inevitable and a peaceful split is much preferable to the alternatives.
The comparison between merit and DEI appointments could not be more apparent than the blatant difference between the logical, constitutional and well considered analysis by Thomas and the rank, repeated vacuousness of KJB.
Those quotes from Silent Cal are from his speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The best term I’ve seen for the folks pushing this ‘progressive’ view is “Know Betters” inasmuch as they insist they know better than anyone else what everyone else should be doing. (Though I suspect that at the top is a group of fools who believe that if they can finalize total democrat rule that they’ll sit in the seat/seats of power. They ignore the history that insists otherwise.)
May I attempt to distill this essay to three paragraphs?
The founding fathers were classical scholars and, as such, very aware of the Governments of antiquity and the works of Polybius. They were aware of the tyranny of a democracy so they created a Constitutional Republic to counter balance mob rule. They were aware of the tyranny of a monarchy so created branches of Government to keep Government in check. They were aware of the failures of an aristocracy so rid themselves of it by elevating the individual as the peer. They tried to design a system of government that would avoid the cyclical trap called Anacyclosis.
The new progressives seek mob rule and a Government to enforce it thus falling into the classical trap as they are ignorant of or, worse yet, ignore the work of Polybius. They would condemn us to fail and their motives are their Achilles heel.
Their motives are either stupidity, ignorance or to enrich themselves as the new royalty in a return to kingship. Either way, they are simple anarchists and deserve to be treated as such. Counter their motives and their arguments collapse.