Two days after defeating tea party challenger Matt Bevin, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that he would no longer stand with Rand.
Ayn Rand, that is.
In a speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute, McConnell said that Republicans “have often lost sight of the fact that our average voter is not John Galt,” a reference to the persecuted inventor in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged who leads business elites in a strike against socialism.
McConnell said this tendency was a natural outgrowth of the GOP’s emphasis on the free market and business, but one that helped cement the party’s elitist image on an electoral level.
“It’s a good impulse to be sure, but for most Americans whose daily concerns revolve around aging parents, long commutes, shrinking budgets, and obscenely high tuition bills, these hymns to entrepreneurialism are as a practical matter largely irrelevant,” McConnell said. “And the audience for them is probably a lot smaller than we think.”
McConnell’s argument was in line with the theme of the AEI event, which was organized to promote a new book of policy essays by conservative intellectuals on how to help the middle class and working poor. Ever since Mitt Romney lost big in the 2012 presidential contest stressing a business-focused message, GOP leaders have been working overtime to prove they can still be the party of the little guy, with mixed results.
Besides McConnell, the event featured House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and GOP Sens. Mike Lee and Tim Scott, who each stressed the importance of broadening the party’s appeal to voters of more modest means.
“For me, it’s very helpful sometimes to think about the working family or maybe the single mom who at the end of the hard day has put her kids to bed and then has to face how is she going to make ends meet and pay the bills at the end of the month,” Cantor said.
The event also featured an all-star cast of conservative reformers, including New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru, former Bush official Pete Wehner, and writer Reihan Salam, who encouraged party leaders to emphasize issues like student debt and child tax credits that might resonate with working families.
All of these writers have shown an impressive willingness to question party orthodoxy.









