Justice Clarence Thomas Is Right about Progressivism
05/28/2026
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Mises Wire
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William L. Anderson
In a recent speech at the University of Texas Law School, Justice Clarence Thomas attacked the political doctrines of progressivism, declaring this belief system not only to be “anti-American,” but also the source of political oppression both in the United States and Europe. Not surprisingly, his speech was not well-received among American progressives who insist that progressivism represented much-needed reforms in American society to curb the excesses of capitalism. Huffed Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California-Berkeley School of Law:
Thomas suggests that the country began to go wrong early in the 20th century with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. It is true that Wilson considered himself a progressive. But, on race issues, he was among our least progressive presidents, barring Black individuals from the federal civil service.
And it was progressives, led by the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall, who successfully challenged the Jim Crow laws that imposed apartheid through much of the country and culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. It was also progressives who finally succeeded in Loving v. Virginia, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, in declaring unconstitutional laws prohibiting interracial marriage. It was progressives who ultimately overcame strong and sustained conservative opposition to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Clearly, Chemerinsky does not know his legal history very well, and he certainly is not familiar with the role that progressives played in establishing Jim Crow laws across the country. Historians like Vann Woodward and David Southern authoritatively pointed out where progressives from both the North and the South were responsible for pushing legal segregation, although both authors did support progressivism themselves, calling progressive racism a “blind spot.” David Kiriazis and I wrote in 2013:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/justice-clarence-thomas-right-about-progressivism
