This argument is visible in the controversy surrounding Tucker Carlson’s monologue a month ago, which stirred up libertarian backlash by calling for Republicans to use government policy to make American life friendlier to families, and particularly to single-earner households. It also informs the difference between Carney’s book and the other smart right-of-center volume of the moment, Oren Cass’s “The Once and Future Worker.” The two authors share a certain common ground, but in the end Carney concludes that “our current economic and social ills … cannot be solved or even significantly ameliorated by any president, or by the central government at all,” while Cass’s whole thesis is that wiser policymaking could make a big difference to the unhappy heartlanders Carney profiles.

But the fullest case for rupture, for declaring that “the era of limited government is over,” is offered in two recent essays in conservative intellectual journals — Dan McCarthy’s “A New Conservative Agenda” in First Things, and Gladden Pappin’s “Toward a Party of the State” in American Affairs. Both envision a conservatism that is oriented less toward the state-as-enemy or the state-as-danger and much more toward the state-as-shaper and the state-as-harmonizer. For instance, here is McCarthy’s account of how the economic nationalism of Donald Trump can be transmuted into something less inchoate and more effective:

Economic nationalism is not just about tariffs. It is less about “economic” than it is about “nationalism” — that is, it takes account of the different needs of different walks of life and regions of the country, serving the whole by serving its parts and drawing them ­together. In the past, the challenge was to harmonize farmers, urban capital and labor. The challenge now is to balance those groups with the postindustrial classes as well, and to strengthen the productive economy against the largely fictional economy of administrators and clerks. All of this is for the sake not just of prosperity, in raw dollar terms, but of a national economy that provides the basis for a healthy culture in which citizens and their families can flourish.

Pappin makes a similar argument about how both political coalitions, but especially the right, should adapt to the current challenge from “illiberal” or “post-liberal” forces, both populist and socialist:

Rather than asking the question “What should conservatives/progressives do?” considerable advances can be made through certain purely practical considerations: “How can the integrity of the national political community be assured?” “How can commercial activity and technological development continue to be turned toward the common good, and toward our own strategic advantage?” “What can we do with the reins of power, that is, the state, to ensure the common good of our citizens?”

The likely answers to these “practical” questions, Pappin contends, require conservatives to make practical “use of the administrative state” for right-wing ends, rather than constantly returning to “plaintive, nostalgic and counterproductive calls for its abolition.”

A hostile reader of these essays, libertarian or liberal, might respond that a vision in which right-wing governments seek to reshape culture and mediate between classes resembles nothing so much as early-20th century fascism. A more sympathetic reader would say no, there is plenty of space for more a state-friendly conservative politics in between movement conservatism and Mussolini, and what McCarthy and Pappin are envisioning might be better described as a blend of the American Hamiltonian tradition with a 21st-century update of French Gaullism.

And the most subtle reader might say that they’re trying to provide the theory for a move that the Republican Party once in power tends to make anyway — both of the last two G.O.P. presidents have been, in some sense, “big government conservatives” — but so far without the strategy, seriousness and self-consciousness required to make the project a success.

I have enough of my own skepticism about the efficacy of state power to be uncertain if the project can succeed. But post-Trump conservatives are likely to be drawn to state-power conservatism not just by theoretical ambition but by a sense of political necessity.

The earlier conservative self-understanding, in which the right was defending nongovernmental institutions against the power of the state, tacitly depended on the assumption that many if not most nongovernmental institutions would be friendly to conservative values. But as civil society has decayed over recent decades, its remaining power centers have also become increasingly left-wing.

Already-liberal institutions — universities, Hollywood, the big foundations and the mass media — are now more uniformly allied with the left than even the very recent past. Corporate America happily donates to Republicans because it fears a Bernie Sanders presidency, but on cultural issues big business courts its younger customers with progressive lobbying and propaganda. In religion, Catholicism under Pope Francis aspires (scandals permitting) to ease its way leftward as well, leaving evangelical Christianity as an isolated bastion with little culture-shaping power.