One of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most stalwart conservative voices is warning that progressive ideology is incompatible with America’s founding principles and poses an existential threat to the nation’s continued existence. Justice Clarence Thomas spoke at the University of Texas Austin Law School on Wednesday, hailing the school’s upcoming program focused on civics and the history of Western civilization. “Your plans could not come at a more important moment for our nation when, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the very values announced in it have fallen out of favor,” Thomas told leaders, teachers, and students of the law school.

“As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure. At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream,” Thomas said, recalling that President Woodrow Wilson, who was a “prominent proponent” of these principles, named them progressivism and derived them from a secular, European mode of governance. “Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many inroads into our system of government and our way of life. It has co-existed uneasily with the principles of the Declaration, because it is opposed to those principles.”

“It is not possible for the two to coexist forever,” the Supreme Court justice warned. “Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement, with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War, to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration. Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident,” he said.

Singling out Wilson as a historical villain, Thomas recounted that progressives harbored (and still do harbor today) “contempt” for Americans and the principles of America’s founding. “The European system that Wilson and the progressives scolded Americans for not adopting, which he called ‘nearly perfect,’ led to the governments that caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen,” Thomas observed. “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration [is] based.”

America’s Declaration of Independence, Thomas asserted, contains two unique and crucial principles. The first is that the rights of man come from God, not from the Constitution or the government. “Even as so much of our God-given and constitutional rights were denied us,” Thomas said, recalling the laws of racial segregation and the prevailing racial hostility which permeated his home state of Georgia growing up, “we still faithfully said the Pledge of Allegiance, memorized the preamble to the Constitution, and yearned for the fulfillment of its promised ideals.” He continued, “At home, at school, and at church, we were taught that we are inherently equal, that equality comes came from God and that it could not be diminished by man.” Thomas insisted, “We were made in the image and likeness of God. That proposition was not debatable and was beyond the power of man to alter. Others with power and animus could treat us as unequal, but they lacked the divine power to make us so.”

The second key principle of the Declaration, Thomas said, is found in the document’s final line: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” The sense of self-sacrifice evinced in that line, the commitment to uphold one’s beliefs and principles even at the cost of one’s life, Thomas said, is the “supreme act of courage. Those principles were more important than their fear. Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence. Without that sentence, the rest of the Declaration is but mere words on parchment paper.”

“What changed the world was not the words, but the commitment and spirit of the people who were willing to labor, sacrifice, and even give their lives — what Lincoln at Gettysburg called the ‘last full measure of devotion’ — for the Declaration’s principles,” the nearly-35-year veteran of the Supreme Court averred. That “devotion” was lived out in the nation’s founding, by the men who fought and, in many cases, died for the then-fledgling United States, and has been lived out in successive generations who have fought, toiled, and sacrificed for the good of the nation. “Sadly, these sentiments are not as widely shared among our fellow citizens today, and they certainly do not seem to have that sustaining strength that they had back then,” he observed. “In fact, all too often the sentiments tend toward cynicism, rejection, hostility, and animus toward our country and its ideals.”

“All too often, there is an unfortunate tendency when discussing the Declaration to make these self-evident truths and first principles of government obscure,” Thomas charged. Those he referred to as “intellectuals” cast the nation’s founding principles as “matters of esoteric philosophy or sophisticated debate,” and even many conservatives “too often talk about them as if they were academic playthings. They overcomplicate them, take the spirit out of them and discuss them in a way that puts us to sleep.” He added, “It is that devotion that we are missing today, and that we must find in our hearts if this nation is to endure.”

While progressivism threatens America’s foundational principles from the outside, the “cowardice” of many of those charged with upholding the nation’s principles and laws, Thomas said, threatens to allow the collapse of the nation from within. “Since the day I arrived in Washington, there was never a shortage of people espousing noble purposes, saying all the right things. All around me, there have been people full of promises, claiming a commitment to some righteous cause, to traditional morality, to national defense, to free enterprise, to religious piety, or to the original meaning of the Constitution,” the justice recounted. Many of these people are high-minded and eloquent in their defense of their ideals, he said, and speak with force and passion. “All too often, however, this was but lip service, camouflaged by grand theories in the tall grass of big words and eloquent phrases. What seemed to be lacking, however, was that devotion.”

Too many of those charged with upholding or safeguarding the principles and laws of the nation “become petrified by criticisms, so fearful of negative attention that they find ways to avoid doing the right thing, or they fall prey to the enchanting siren songs of flattery, and become so bewitched by praise that they will desperately seek to conform accordingly,” Thomas said. “When Americans look to Washington and wonder why it so often disappoints, it is not because there are too few people who know what is right. It is not because we lack the intellect or the capacity or the talent,” he continued. “It is instead because there are too few people who are willing to do what it takes to do the right thing to sacrifice the popularity, flattery, comfort, and security that are the purchase price for principle.” He added, “It is because too few of us reflect on and reflect the courage and commitment of that final sentence of the Declaration. And so many seem to have forgotten how much others have sacrificed so that this nation could exist and endure.”

Thomas recalled a period in his life when he “faced this struggle” himself, referring to the spring of 1983 as “the lowest point in my life.” At the time, Thomas had just buried his grandparents, who had raised him, and was broke and expected to be “evicted from a cockroach infested apartment.” He was having difficulty paying credit card bills and was preparing to sell his car in order to pay for his son’s tuition. On top of all of his personal difficulties, Thomas was “being constantly attacked by the media and Congress” for re-structuring the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which he headed at the time, and eliminating race-based quotas. “At that point, I asked myself a simple question: ‘What are your principles worth? What are your principles worth to you?’ My answer then was the same I would give today. They are worth life itself,” he stated. “What are those principles? They are the same principles in the Declaration.”

“I believe now, as I did then, that the Declaration of 1776 provides us with the principles to guide us as citizens of our Republic. Even in this time of questioning and criticism of our founding, we should not forget that the Declaration established the principles that produced — despite all of our imperfections, our miscues, and our tragic mistakes — it gave us the freest, wealthiest, and most powerful nation in the history of the world,” Thomas asserted. “It did not establish a form of government that was the work of the Constitution that followed, but it stated the purpose of government. The Declaration made it clear in clear prose that the purpose of government is to protect our God-given unalienable rights, rights that all individuals equally possess.”