Not so very long ago, there was a little movement known as reform conservatism, which was supposed to supply the intellectual ballast for a normal center-right presidency, the policy ideas for a post-Tea Party G.O.P. I was part of this small church; you can find a larger gathering of its apostles photographed in a worthy-of-John Trumbull setting for the July 6, 2014, issue of this paper's Sunday Magazine — which ran almost exactly one year before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator and ensured that no normal center-right presidency would happen this decade.
Like all small sects, reform conservatism had its share of internal divisions, but the basic idea was to claim a middle ground between left-wing pessimism about the post-1970s American economy and right-wing faith in the eternal verities of Reaganomics. The left looked at the years from Reagan to the younger Bush and saw an ascendant plutocracy and an immiserated working class. The official orthodoxy of the right — embodied most notably by the Wall Street Journal editorial page — saw a long period of solid post-stagflation growth that only lacked for more supply-side tax cuts to be truly turbocharged.
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