Author Henry Olsen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about his new book,The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism.
Olsen said he was inspired to write the book by “the debacle of 2008, where conservatism and Republicanism seemed to be in retreat.”
“I knew Ronald Reagan had brought us back from the dead before, so I thought I’d look and see how he did it, and I learned that everything I knew about Reagan was wrong, that he was much more of a populist than he had been given credit, and that’s what allowed him to attract the Reagan Democrats that put him in the White House and let him change America and the world,” he said.
Marlow cited a passage of the book which explains that Reagan forged a bond with white working-class voters from the Democrats’ New Deal coalition who were concerned with rising crime and taxes in the Sixties and Seventies, and the lack of respect for American virtues shown by the Sixties cultural revolutionaries. He noted the parallels with President Trump’s appeal to a similar bloc of voters, who propelled him to an upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Originally published by Breitbart.
