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Henry Olsen joins Brian Anderson to discuss Henry’s new book The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism.
For nearly 30 years, the Republican Party had defined itself by Ronald Reagan’s legacy: a strong military, free trade, lower taxes, and most important, smaller government. When Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, many observers in the media and professional political circles asked a familiar question: Is the Republican Party still the Party of Reagan?
According to Henry Olsen, Trump’s election actually gives Republicans their best chance to “re-Reaganize” the GOP.
Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. From 2006 -2013, he served as Vice President and Director of the National Research Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute. He previously worked as Vice President of Programs at the Manhattan Institute and President of the Commonwealth Foundation.
City Journal is a magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute.
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A brief, disappointing interview about an excellent book written by an interesting thinker. Pethakoukis’s recent podcast with Olsen was much better.
The most grating part was the end, when Anderson brought up the imminent decline in what have been staple middle class non-technical occupations, truck driving and waitressing. The solutions suggested were right out of the “Julia” mode of government paternalism. The first, obvious response – stop all immigration, legal and refugee resettlement, right now and for the foreseeable future – was not even considered.
We’d rather import 1.2 million legal immigrants every year forever in the face of a looming employment crisis into a country in debt to its proverbial eyebrows than even dream of offending our founding father, Emma Lazarus.