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As America celebrates its 250th anniversary next month, the nation finds itself at a moment of deep civic uncertainty. Americans are feeling that something essential is being lost – a shared sense of who we are and what we stand for.
Our universities are now debating whether equality is a universal truth or merely a product of its time. Public institutions hesitate to defend the natural-rights philosophy that justified the American Revolution. Even the idea of a common national creed seems fragile.
Yet amid this cultural confusion, a Supreme Court justice has spent more than three decades insisting that the Declaration of Independence still means what it says — and that the country cannot survive without its moral framework.
Protecting the Declaration of Independence in our 250th year
Justice Clarence Thomas, now the court’s second-longest-serving member, has long argued that the declaration is not a formal statement. This is the basic statement of the political theory of the republic. This approach may not be fashionable at elite institutions, but that is exactly how the founders understood the document.
Thomas Jefferson called the Declaration “an expression of the American mind.” Abraham Lincoln famously described it as “the apple of gold”, with the Constitution designed as a “frame of silver” to protect it. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. also considered its claims morally compelling.
The Founders did not design a pure democracy. They feared what Elbridge Gerry called “the excesses of democracy” and deliberately created a constitutional republic to secure natural rights. The Constitution was drafted to protect those rights more effectively than the Articles of Confederation. It is a means, not an end. The objectives – the political philosophy that gives the Constitution its purpose – are clearly stated in the Declaration.
Equality and natural rights are the moral foundations of the American experiment. The Constitution exists to protect them.
Justice Thomas has been the Court’s most consistent practitioner of this originalist approach, particularly in cases involving civil rights and equality. He interprets constitutional guarantees such as equal protection and due process through the lens of the Declaration’s moral commitments rather than changing political priorities.
In a landmark 1995 government contract case, Thomas cited the Equality Clause of the Declaration as the controlling principle, warning that racial paternalism “is at war with the principle of underlying equality that underpins and underpins our Constitution.” For more than thirty years, he has said that the Constitution cannot be reconciled with policies that treat citizens unequally on the basis of race. His landmark concurrence in the 2023 Harvard and UNC admissions cases reaffirmed that commitment and reshaped the current legal landscape.
This is not nostalgia. This is constitutional loyalty.
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The Founders believed that natural rights precede government, equality is a fact of human nature, and the purpose of government is to secure these rights. Thomas has spent more than three decades reminding the country of those important premises.
His critics often accuse him of clinging to an old view of America. the opposite is true. His jurisprudence is visionary precisely because it is based on the only principles that have allowed the United States to correct its course.
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At a time when debates over race, identity and equality dominate our politics, Thomas’s clarity about the meaning of the declaration is more relevant than ever.
The upcoming anniversary is a rare opportunity to regain that understanding. A nation that firmly believes that all men are created equal can be held responsible when it falls short. A nation that abandons that belief has no standards left by which to judge itself.
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The Declaration of Independence is not merely the birth certificate of the nation. It is the statement of national purpose that has guided every major movement of American reform. As the United States reflects on 250 years of independence, it’s worth noting that a judge has never lost sight of the principles that made the country possible.
If America wants to reclaim its sense of purpose in 250 years, it must begin where Clarence Thomas has always stood: with the timeless truths of the Declaration of Independence.
