Ronald Reagan presented his optimistic vision of the United States in easy, accessible language that resonated deeply with the American people.
The unique gift earned him the nickname "The Great Communicator."
But his sunny if plainly presented faith in "a city upon a hill" was anything but simple.
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Reagan's philosophy and outlook were rooted in a complex command of historic, intellectual and geopolitical forces that made the United States unique in human history and the "last best hope on Earth," Reagan biographer Craig Shirley told Fox News Digital.
"Ronald Reagan was a born optimist. It was at the heart of his governing philosophy," said Shirley, author of "Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America" and other books about the 40th president.
Reagan's legacy serves as the backdrop of the second Republican primary debate on Wednesday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Simi, California, hosted by FOX Business.
Reagan's foundational values and ability to express them with charismatic style inspired support from Americans of all walks of life made him one of the most popular politicians in American history.
He won two landslide elections in 1980 and 1984 and helped the United States emerge from its self-doubting "malaise" of the 1970s stronger and more hopeful than ever.
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"He put [his philosophy] into practice after years of sinking American morale. He knew a happy people are a productive people," said Shirley.
"Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter told the American people how bad things are. Reagan told the American people often how good things were and how things were improving."
Here’s a look at five reasons why Ronald Reagan loved America that capture the intellectual foundation of The Great Communicator.
Roots of America's faith-based optimism were planted by a small band of religious separatists who settled the New World in 1620 "for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith."
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A powerful spirit grew in the society they and others forged against overwhelming odds.
It lifted the nation with a spontaneous outpouring of faithful optimism in perhaps the nation's most anxious hour, during the World War II D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.
The American people flooded houses of worship that day while President Roosevelt's national prayer beseeched "Almighty God" for the blessing of America’s boys, "thy heroic servants," in their "struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity."
The same optimism fueled Reagan’s own personal relationship with God and his emergence as a powerful ambassador of the nation’s foundational values.
"From his mother and her fervent faith, Reagan first learned about the goodness of God and how to live his life," said Shirley.
"He carried that belief in a loving and merciful God with him his entire life. Even in his last letter announcing his Alzheimer’s, there was still an underlying belief in God."
This faith appeared most notably in Reagan’s famous "city upon a hill" farewell address — recalling the words of Puritan settler John Winthrop.
"It was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity … and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here."
The United States was founded as the world's first nation "of laws and not of men," in the words of Founding Father John Adams.
This new hope for the world was laid out publicly and defiantly in the Declaration of Independence.
The blueprint that turned its ideals into action was outlined a decade later in the U.S. Constitution.
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Similar constitutional frameworks have since adopted by nations around the world and become the global standard of governance.
"There is a reason the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are etched on the walls of the Reagan Library," said Shirley.
"The Declaration rejects the divinity of kings and recognized the rights of every person. The Constitution codifies those inalienable rights. It also does something quite important; the document explicitly says what government cannot do. It is a document of negative governance."
Said Reagan, "The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of these United States are covenants we have made not only with ourselves, but with all mankind."
He went on, "Our founding documents proclaim to the world that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few. It is the universal right of all God's children."
Reagan's patriotism was not jingoistic blind devotion to the nation state.
It was instead an intellectual devotion to foundational ideas that made the United States the first nation on earth defined by something deeper than race, ethnicity or monarchial realm.
Intrepid heroes armed with powerful ideas — courage and intellect — made American exceptionalism a real and powerful force that spread the idea of representative government across the planet.
"Reagan’s patriotism was as deeply ingrained in him as anything in his being. In his farewell address to the American people, he called for an ‘Informed Patriotism,’" said Shirley.
Said Reagan himself, "I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual."
Reagan’s greatest testament perhaps to the courageous idealism of American exceptionalism came atop a windswept bluff in France on June 6, 1984, addressing D-Day heroes on the 40th anniversary of the invasion of Europe.
"Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began," Reagan said in his powerful "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" address.
"The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest."
Reagan stood resolutely and dramatically against the foreign threat of communism and socialism, which throughout history begot authoritarianism.
He dramatically issued a demand for economic and personal freedom in the shadows of the Iron Curtain in West Berlin at the height of the Cold War on June 12, 1987.
"Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate," Reagan demanded of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, before a massive crowd in a city divided by the Berlin Wall.
"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
The Berlin Wall was joyously torn down by Berliners just two years later.
The "tear down this wall" speech provides a memorable highlight. But Reagan warned with haunting prophecy throughout his political career of the threat posed by socialism from foreign enemies — and from enemies of freedom from within.
"Reagan once joked that socialism could only be found in two places. Heaven, where they don’t need it and hell, where they already have it," said Shirley.
"Reagan knew and often said that socialism was the sharing of scarcity. He quoted Churchill on this matter that ‘Socialism is the philosophy of failure.’ Of course, as an economic major, he knew socialism was designed to fail."
Reagan believed the intellectual arsenal needed to defeat leftist tyranny had already been given to the American people by the Founding Fathers.
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The firepower was found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and in the dignity of each human being armed with faith and protected by limits not on their rights but on the power of government.
The entire history of the world for millennia was defined by powerful people abusing instruments of government to control ordinary citizens and concentrate central authority.
That universal history of mankind was challenged, then shattered by a radical new notion, espoused by a group of fiery American intellectuals in 1776, that "governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
"Reagan knew in the history of the world that there had never been devised a government of the people, by the people and for the people," said Shirley.
"He knew the American system of government was unique. Here, power flows upwards to the government from the people," Shirley also said.
"You can’t be for big government, big taxes, and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy," Reagan said in 1988, among thousands of warnings he issued about the insidious power of government to aid itself first at the expense of its citizens.
"Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives," he said in another.
Reagan believed the ultimate bulwark against tyranny was the enlightened American individual; buoyed by faith in foundational values and ever vigilant that, embedded deep in the DNA of the human species, is a thirst for people with power to seek more of it.
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"Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction," Reagan famously said in his first inaugural address as governor of California in 1967.
"It is not ours by inheritance. It must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again."
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