Ronald Reagan, Working Class Hero: New Book Speaks Loudly to Donald Trump’s America

A familiar narrative of recent American history runs like this: The modern conservative movement started bubbling in the 1930s and 1940s, in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.  Then, in 1964, “The Movement” started really roaring, when Barry Goldwater, a fervent opponent of the New Deal, won the Republican presidential nomination.  Goldwater lost in a landslide that year, and yet even in defeat, he laid the seeds for the future victories of his logical successor, Ronald Reagan.  Reagan won the governorship of California in 1966, amidst the national backlash against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society liberalism, and then, in 1980, he won the White House, thus finally redeeming Goldwater’s anti-New Deal vision.

This narrative shapes much of Republican thinking to this day.  In domestic policy, Republicans, styling themselves as latter-day Reaganites, tend to judge their “purity” based on their opposition to such pillars of the New Deal as Social Security, even as they pursue post-Reagan agenda items such as the flat tax and school vouchers.  Meanwhile, in foreign policy, Reagan wannabes have gone hunting overseas for new “evil empires” to bring down.

These crusaders might admit that ideas such as Social Security privatization and Iraq-style regime-change are distinctly unpopular, and yet, this thinking continues, if they are in the tradition of the Gipper, they must be good.  And so Republicans should keep pushing them, they insist, in the prayerful hope for some ultimate rendezvous with Reagan.  After all, what Republican would want to break faith with the 40th president, the last truly popular two-term GOP chief executive?

Yet now comes author Henry Olsen with another interpretation of Reagan’s life and work.  He argues that the familiar narrative is, in fact, wrong, that it badly misreads the real Reagan.  In his new book, The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism, Olsen, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC—a group founded by a man, Ernest Lefever, whom President Reagan would later nominate for a top job at the State Department—argues that Republicans today are getting the Reagan record wrong.  In misremembering Reagan’s life, they misapprehend Reagan’s legacy.

More here: Jim Pinkerton - Breitbart