Richard Rovere, this magazine’s mid-twentieth-century Washington correspondent, was the person mainly responsible for introducing into the American vocabulary the term “the establishment.” (He’d picked it up from the British journalist Henry Fairlie.) It has turned out to be a very sticky word, though, as Rovere understood, it’s nearly impossible to define with precision, because the establishment is not a formally constituted entity. That’s why Rovere’s original essay about it, which appeared in The American Scholar, in 1961, was written partly as a joke.

Nonetheless, Rovere’s take on the establishment holds up amazingly well. He insisted that the establishment shouldn’t be confused with what he called “the Organization,” meaning business interests that “would like to overthrow the Establishment.” The establishment was, and is, universities, foundations, the mainstream media, Wall Street, and those parts of government that deal with law, money, and diplomacy. It controls “respectable opinion.”

He declared the Times to be “the official Establishment daily,” and it still is. He noted that the establishment was ardently in favor of free trade, thought of itself as liberal on racial issues (Martin Luther King, Jr., he reported, was being considered for membership), gently approved of religion as long as it wasn’t fundamentalist, and was willing to tolerate ideological diversity, but only up to a point—all still true. And he saw that democratic politics was a problem for the establishment, because elected politicians are usually too tightly moored to the public’s passions to be truly reliable members.

Nobody could have foreseen Donald Trump, but Rovere’s remarks about Presidential elections are pertinent to this campaign season. The establishment “rarely fails to get one of its members, or at least one of its allies, into the White House,” he wrote. But it is not powerful enough “to control a nominating convention or actually to dictate nominations. National conventions represent regional interests much as Congress does, and there is always a good deal of unarticulated but nonetheless powerful anti-Establishment sentiment at the quadrennial gatherings of both Republicans and Democrats.”

Hillary Clinton is without a doubt either a member or an ally of the establishment—probably the former—and there was powerful anti-establishment sentiment at both Conventions. In the Democrats’ case it was contained; in the Republicans’, it was controlling. What has changed since Rovere was writing is that the establishment has moved from being bipartisan but mainly Republican to being overwhelmingly Democratic. Ronald Reagan moved the Republican Party to the right in ways that alienated the establishment, especially on social issues like abortion; Bill Clinton moved the Democratic Party to the center in ways that attracted the establishment, especially on economic issues like trade and deregulation. Trump is now likely to become the first Republican candidate ever to lose among white, college-educated voters.

Right now, people are wondering whether, after Trump’s apparently inevitable defeat on November 8th, the Republican establishment will be able to reassert control over the Party. We often forget, though, that even after the 2012 election, there was a round of hand-wringing by senior Republican politicians and funders over what seemed to have been an unacceptably high level of populism. There had been too many Presidential candidates, too long a primary season, and too many debates, with not enough serious policy discussion. And only a year ago it seemed as if the Republicans had an unusually bountiful crop of plausible conventional Presidential candidates—Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Chris Christie—and, in Paul Ryan’s long, earnest “Path to Prosperity” budget document, a serious governing manifesto. Everybody seemed to think that the 2016 nominee’s big project would be uniting the Party’s business, religious, and Tea Party anti-government constituencies.

What Trump made clear was that a completely different message is pure magic, at least with Republican primary voters, and at least if delivered by him personally: swaggering, red-hot resentment of Rovere’s establishment, immigrants, and ethnic minorities, combined with full-throated advocacy of venerable laborist policies on economics and social welfare that the other Republicans assumed had been killed off back in the Reagan-Thatcher era. The gap between the establishment’s institutions and Republican electoral politics seems unbridgeable in the near future.

A useful synecdoche for the changing relationship of the Republican Party to the establishment is the Bush family. Prescott Bush, a senator from Connecticut, lived in an echt-establishment world of Greenwich, Yale, Wall Street, and causes like Planned Parenthood and the United Negro College Fund. His son George H. W. Bush moved to Texas and spent much of his political career insisting that he wasn’t as establishment as he appeared to be. His son George W. Bush was raised in Texas, embraced a more militant conservatism, actively courted religious fundamentalists, and lived at a self-enforced distance from Prescott Bush’s world.* Today, the only Bush who holds political office, George P. (for Prescott), Jeb Bush’s forty-year-old son, who is the Texas land commissioner, has spent no significant time in the Northeast, and is the only Bush who endorsed Trump for President.

The Republican establishment is by no means dead, but whatever comeback it stages in the 2020 election will depend less on tweaking the nomination process, as some have suggested, and more on finding a way to make what’s still, in terms of its organizations and funding sources, the party of business a lot more appealing to the employee class. Whatever ingrained deference to authority figures there was back in the days of Prescott Bush is long gone, and it isn’t coming back.

*An earlier version of this sentence mistakenly stated that George W. Bush was born in Texas.