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As America celebrates its 250th birthday next month, the country finds itself in a state of deep social uncertainty. Americans recognize that there is something important going on – a shared understanding of who we are and what we stand for.
Our universities are now debating whether equality is a common truth or just a product of its time. Public institutions are reluctant to defend the natural rights philosophy that justified the American Revolution. Even the idea of a common belief of the nation seems fragile.
Yet amid this cultural confusion, one 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.
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Justice Clarence Thomas, who is the second longest-serving member of the Court, has long argued that the Declaration is not festive propaganda. It is a basic republican statement of political principle. That view may not be fashionable in higher institutions, but that is how the founders understood the text.
Thomas Jefferson called this declaration “the speech of the American mind.” Abraham Lincoln famously described it as an “apple of gold,” with the Constitution serving as a “silver lining” designed to protect it. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. they similarly treat their claims as morally binding.
The founders did not design a pure democracy. They fear what Elbridge Gerry called “the excesses of democracy” and deliberately build a constitutional republic to protect natural rights. The Constitution was written to protect those rights more effectively than the Articles of Confederation. It is a means, not an end. The ends – the political philosophy that gives the Constitution its purpose – are clearly defined in the Declaration.
Equality and natural rights are the moral foundations of American research. The Constitution is there to protect them.
Justice Thomas has been the Court’s most consistent practitioner of this 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 obligations rather than changing political preferences.
In a landmark 1995 federal contract case, Thomas warned that racism “is at odds with the principle of natural equality that underlies and enshrines our Constitution,” citing the equality clause of the Declaration as the governing principle. For more than three decades, he has maintained that the Constitution cannot be reconciled with policies that treat citizens unequally based on race. His major concurrences in the 2023 Harvard and UNC admissions cases reaffirmed that commitment and reshaped the current legal landscape.
This is not nostalgia. Constitutional loyalty.
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The founders believed that natural rights precede government, that equality is a fact of human nature, and that the purpose of government is to protect these rights. Thomas has spent more than three decades reminding the country of those important buildings.
His critics often accuse him of clinging to an outdated vision of America. The opposite is true. His legislation is forward-looking—precisely because it adheres to the only principles that have ever allowed the United States to correct its course.
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At a time when debates about race, identity, and equality dominate our politics, Thomas’ clarity about the meaning of the Declaration is more important than ever.
The celebration of the coming years is a rare opportunity to restore that understanding. A nation that firmly believes that all men are created equal can be counted on to fail. A nation that abandons that belief has no standard by which to judge itself.
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The Declaration of Independence is not just a nation’s birth certificate. It is the national mission statement that guides every major American reform movement. As America looks back on 250 years of independence, it is noteworthy that one justice 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 always stood: with the timeless truths of the Declaration of Independence.
