“Part of the reason why these blue collar intellectuals…are so effective at speaking to a mass audience is because they come from the masses. A guy like Milton Friedman, who comes from a real working class background, and has had to work, I think that’s going to inform his economics. He’s not going to have some theory that’s up in the ether,” says Daniel J. Flynn, author of Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America.