In which Clarence Thomas has it in for progressivism.

"Hmm," I thought a few minutes ago. "It's Sunday. I owe everybody a blog post. What should I write about? I could write about Pagans and Earth Day if I'd gone to the event I was aiming for yesterday, but instead I slept in...

"Maybe I could rant about the annoying trend of long, long Facebook posts that people are resorting to because Facebook will throttle the reach of any post with an off-Facebook link in it. Except I think a lot of folks saw my Facebook post about it yesterday. Why beat a dead horse?

"Wait. When was the last time I did a current events post?" <checks post history> "Holy cats, not since March 1st? And that was only a glancing blow! And there's so much there to talk about -- the Iran war that Trump has declared he won too many times to count, Trump's whining about his ballroom, Trump and Vance picking a fight with the pope over Catholic doctrine, of all things...

"I know! I'll write about Clarence Thomas!"

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Why yes, those scales are tilted to the right.
quarta | Deposit Photos

You may have missed it, what with all the usual noise coming from the general direction of the White House. But this week, Justice Thomas gave an address at the University of Texas at Austin Law School. He started out talking about the Declaration of Independence, this being the 250th anniversary of its signing and all. But then he went off on this weird diatribe about how progressivism is going to doom the United States to failure. No, really. The New Republic quoted him: 

Clarence Thomas alone is devoted to the Declaration's principles in Washington, says Clarence Thomas, and the problem is only getting worse. "As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure," the justice warned. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.

"Since Wilson's presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life," Thomas continued. "It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever."

Wilson is not the most famous president to be associated with progressivism; that would be Teddy Roosevelt. But Wilson was an academic, which automatically makes him a target of those who love the poorly educated. Wilson oversaw the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Trade Commission, stronger antitrust laws, and a ban on child labor -- none of which made him popular with the rich. 

Wilson was president during the nation's first Gilded Age, when rich industrialists were remaking the country to suit themselves. (As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich observes, we are in the nation's second Gilded Age today. It wasn't a good thing for the working class then, and it isn't today, either.)

Thomas went on to draw a line from progressive policies in Germany, which Wilson supposedly based American progressivism on, to -- wait for it -- the rise of Hitler. It gets wackier from there; I recommend the New Republic article I linked to above, if you're interested. 

What interested me more than Justice Thomas's rewriting of history was that at the beginning of his speech, he greeted one of the attendees: Harlan Crow. Yup, that Harlan Crow: the GOP megadonor who has showered Thomas and his wife with vacations and gifts, including buying from Thomas in 2014 the house where Thomas's mother lived in Savannah, GA, and spending tens of thousands of dollars to renovate the property -- a transaction that Thomas somehow forgot to list on his mandatory financial disclosure form.

People are prone to telling themselves all sorts of myths to justify their actions and to maintain their lifestyles. In that respect, the rich are no different.

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These moments of self-serving blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Tax the rich, already!