I found this David Gelernter essay in the Weekly Standard to be really insightful. He saw Reagan as a “mystic nationalist,” someone truly in love with his own country, and unapologetic about it:
Reagan was a realist, but a “mystic nationalist” also. He did in fact call himself a “mystic,” according to Peter Schweizer; and he was certainly a patriot and a nationalist. But mystic nationalism is more than the sum of parts. It is a religion–but one that translucently overlays (without obscuring or superceding) Judaism or Christianity.
Mystic nationalism is a tradition nobly represented in the 20th century by such statesmen as Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion. Reagan would have recognized himself in a passage by the poet Rupert Brooke, killed at age 28 in the First World War. “He was immensely surprised,” Brooke wrote in 1914 about an unnamed friend, “to perceive that the actual earth of England held for him…a quality which, if he’d ever been sentimental enough to use the word, he’d have called ‘holiness.’ His astonishment grew as the full flood of ‘England’ swept him on from thought to thought. He felt the triumphant helplessness of a lover.”
“There are a few favorite windows I have up there that I like to stand and look out of early in the morning,” Reagan said in his farewell speech, referring to the White House. “The view is over the grounds here to the Washington Monument, and then the Mall and the Jefferson Memorial. But on mornings when the humidity is low, you can see past the Jefferson to the river, the Potomac, and the Virginia shore. Someone said that’s the view Lincoln had when he saw the smoke rising from the Battle of Bull Run. I see more prosaic things: the grass on the banks, the morning traffic as people make their way to work, now and then a sailboat on the river.”
This love of the physical aspects of one’s own country is a very Tory sentiment and Reagan’s least remarked ability was to summon up these feelings until they became a “civil religion” of sorts. His week-long funeral was, in some ways, a beautiful ritual of that civil religion – binding us together, setting us apart, lifting us up.
The Dish 