Reagan: 'We the People'

President Reagan had the ability to foresee what others could not. In the early 1980s, liberal intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith were lauding the economic accomplishments of the Soviet Union.

At the same time, Reagan told the British Parliament that a “global campaign for freedom” would prevail over the forces of tyranny and that “the Soviet Union itself is not immune to this reality.” By the end of the decade, as he predicted, Marxism-Leninism was dumped on the ash heap of history.

Reagan’s love of freedom was rooted in two documents–the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Time and again he turned to the wisdom of the Founders. Indeed, more than once, he sounded like one of them.

In his farewell address to the American people in January 1989, President Reagan said, “Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words, “We the people.”

We tell the government what to do, said the president, it doesn’t tell us. This simple and yet revolutionary idea of “We the people,” he explained, was the underlying basis for everything he had tried to do as President.