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.

The reform conservatives aspired to a more nuanced take. Reaganomics had been a relative success in its own time, we thought, part of a necessary turn toward deregulation and freer trade and lower taxes that had pulled Western economies out of their 1970s malaise. Inequality had increased, but middle- and working-class Americans had enjoyed gains nonetheless; even when wages had stagnated, tax cuts and transfer payments had helped boost most Americans’ incomes, and they had shared in the benefits of lower prices and ample consumer goods.

So the left-wing pessimists were too pessimistic, we thought … but at the same time there were real problems facing the working class, a social crisis that had some link to stagnating incomes and the decline of industrial jobs, and the tax-cuts-as-panacea style of conservatism had passed its sell-by date. What was needed was not a repudiation of Reaganomics but an updating (and a recovery of some of Reagan’s own forgotten impulses), in which conservatism would seek to solidify the material basis of the working-class family and blue-collar communities — with child tax credits, wage subsidies, a more skills-based immigration system — even as it retained its basic commitment to free trade, light regulation and economic growth.