An Appreciation
A testimonial delivered to President Reagan in 1988 at the American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner.

Mr. Novak is the George F. Jewett scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
February 6, 2001 3:40 p.m.

r. President, thank you for accomplishing what on January 20, 1981, you said you would: A New Beginning. You said on that day — I must quote your words, but if I can't quite sing your music, I hope you will forgive me:

We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is a time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed…

It's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not on our back.

If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much and prospered as no other people on earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before…. With all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal.

Mr. President, permit me also to recall the First Inaugural of an earlier president:

Entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter — with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one more thing, fellow citizens — wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Thus, Thomas Jefferson in 1801. Mr. President, taking Thomas Jefferson's words as your own, you made "a new beginning" and not only for the United States. Many nations are now imitating your policies. As the main source of hope for the world's poor, they too are turning from government activists to economic activists, that is, to all the people.

Historians tell us that what our framers meant by "revolution" was a turning back to founding principles — in Latin, a re-volvere — a going back to true beginnings.

Was there a Reagan Revolution? Mr. President, it was not exactly a "Reagan" revolution. It was "the American Revolution," now well into its third century, reestablished by you upon our founding principles.

As the founders humbly dared to hope, Mr. President, this American Revolution heralded "a new order" of basic rights for all humanity and for all the ages. This novus ordo seclorum was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that every man and every woman everywhere is created equal. All around the world today — even in Mr. Gorbachev's USSR, if glacially — whole peoples are turning toward these shining principles.

May this revolution last forever, Mr. President, and may your name be linked with its renewal, at this time, in this age, for as many generations yet to come as God sees fit to bless America.

For beginning anew the American Revolution, Mr. President, the revolution of natural liberty, the revolution that belongs to all humanity, we thank you.