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.