But the sequence is useful in a different way: It’s an opportunity to lay down a marker about what white nationalism isn’t, what a healthy conservatism would look like if the racist strain were quarantined, and which conservative ideas that get swept up in condemnations of Trumpism and white identity politics are actually sensible, serious and true.

Start with Menashi’s defense of Israel’s particularist identity. It is not white nationalism to recognize limiting principles on liberal universalism, and a justifiable role for particularity — ethnic, cultural, religious — in many political arrangements. A sprawling multiethnic republic like the present United States is an admirable thing, to be defended against ethnic Balkanization and racist chauvinism alike. But our democratic imperium is not the only legitimate form of political order, and a society does not automatically become illiberal or racist or authoritarian just because it retains an established church or allows a right of return or maintains a preference for a particular language.

Particularism can lead to chauvinism and cruelty, certainly, and there’s room to criticize Israel or any other nation on those grounds. But liberal universalism is no panacea either: It can overreach and impose an oppressive uniformity, or overreach and simply self-destruct. The self-determination of specific tribes and peoples and traditions — be they Polish, Kurdish, Tibetan or Jewish — can be as necessary to human liberty in some cases as a push toward cosmopolitanism is in others. And insofar as universalists of different sorts — liberal Eurocrats, Bush-era neoconservatives — have gone terribly astray recently in ignoring the role of difference in human affairs, a healthy conservatism has to correct for this error even as it resists the pull of bigotry.

Then move to Vance’s plea for pro-natalism and higher American birthrates. It is not white nationalism to believe that countries like the United States would be better off with more babies. That belief can be held for racist reasons by racists, but it can also be held, reasonably and righteously, by people who worry about the economic consequences of demographic decline … or by people who worry about the social consequences of shrinking family trees and a widespread unfulfilled desire for kids … or by people who regard a higher birthrate as a cure for ethnic division because it actually makes assimilating immigrants easier … or by people who just think babies are good and societies that can easily afford to rear more of them should do so.

In reality, far from being creepily obsessed with birthrates, conservatism actually failed America over the last generation by paying insufficient attention to the economics of child rearing and the natural family’s strange decline. And a healthy post-Trump conservatism must be more pro-natalist or it will not be at all.

Then move to Fairbanks’s critique of the supposed “Confederate” style in center-right pleas for intellectual diversity. It is not white nationalism to believe that growing ideological uniformity in the commanding heights of culture makes American politics more polarized. That belief can be expressed in whiny or self-pitying fashion, sure, and it can be expressed in ways that ignore the political power that conservatism obviously wields, sometimes to tremendously ill effect. But fundamentally, it does not rebut the people Fairbanks absurdly analogizes to slaveholders, the people who worry about the ideological monoculture on campuses or the power of groupthink in elite newsrooms, to say, “Donald Trump is president, what are you complaining about?” — not least because Donald Trump is president in part because of a toxic interaction between the left’s cultural power and the right’s bunker mentality!

Of course conservatism’s concern about its own exclusion from cultural influence is self-interested. (How could it not be?) But that exclusion is still real, and no serious post-Trump conservatism could stop challenging and critiquing it — both for the right’s own sake and for the sake of escaping our present political-cultural derangement.