The Blueprint calls for international free-trade agreements and a more liberal immigration system; it recommends reducing spending on Social Security and Medicare and promoting democracy and human rights abroad. Even as the Hoover scholars spoke, Trump was in Youngstown, Ohio, delivering an address on an altogether different vision of foreign policy—one in which America’s interests are paramount and relations with allies are transactional, in which immigrants and their children are subject to what he termed “extreme vetting.”

Other Republicans, like the party’s Senate candidates and House leadership, are “doing the best they can to make the Republican brand as inclusive as possible,” noted Lanhee Chen, a former policy adviser to the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. But that, he lamented, could only go so far in an atmosphere dominated by Trump: “So much is driven by the top of the ticket—it just is.”

With the rise of Trump, institutions like Hoover—the sole public monument to the 31st president, who famously was blamed for exacerbating the Depression— have come to seem like an alternate universe, created in the vain longing that reality were not so. In today’s political climate, it isn’t only these particular ideas that seem quaint—it’s the very idea of having ideas at all.

And yet the intellectuals persist; what else can they do? Having formulated the Blueprint, there was nothing to do but release it, orphaned, into the world. Shultz recalled fondly a meeting at the Kremlin with then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at which a previous Hoover report came up for discussion. “All of a sudden he attacks me for something in the book,” Shultz recalled. “And I said, ‘Oh, my God, somebody read it!’” A lively discussion of markets ensued.

Chief among the many disturbances to the Republican psyche prompted by Trump is the realization on the part of many of the party’s erstwhile mavens that their voters were not nearly as interested in their agenda as they previously believed. The party base proved, in this year’s primaries, not only willing to go along with a candidate who called many of its dogmas into question, but perhaps actively supportive of his heretical ideas. “So much of what you read, what’s in the political agenda, is just so wrong,” Cochrane sputtered, exasperated. “It’s really frustrating. Immigration is good, and trade is good!”

But Republicans don’t have anything they agree on anymore, as the conservative columnist Matt Continetti recently noted. There are Republicans who favor more foreign adventurism and those who favor less of it; those who would drastically shrink the government and those who would consider raising taxes; those who favor gay marriage and those who oppose it. (President Hoover’s great-granddaughter, Margaret Hoover, is a pro-gay-marriage activist.) Nonpartisan analyses of Trump’s tax proposals say it would explode the deficit, something of great concern to budget hawks like Cogan. “But, judging by the candidates’ proposals, I’m not sure there’s agreement that a problem exists,” he said mournfully.