Marvin Olasky still remembers the Alamo. Not the famous battle waged there, mind you, but a protest at the site in 1995 against the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse. That state agency was threatening to shut down a faith-based drug rehabilitation program, called Teen Challenge, for failing to employ licensed counselors. In sweltering heat, demonstrators waved signs praising Jesus for delivering them from addiction. They stressed how much money Teen Challenge had saved taxpayers. They weren’t about to let those meddling bureaucrats get in the way of saving lives.

Olasky, now the editor-in-chief of the Christian magazine World, ultimately took up this cause in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. He urged readers to contact the governor’s mansion in Austin, and it wasn’t long before he personally heard from its occupant, George W. Bush, just months into his first term. “I went and had lunch with W.,” Olasky recalled in a speech on Thursday to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C., “and maybe because of his own battle with alcohol, he got it right away. He supported Teen Challenge. He then supported bills that the Texas legislature passed to keep the bureaucrats off the backs of other groups. That, for me, was ‘compassionate conservatism’—liberate what Edmund Burke called the little platoons, what Alexis de Tocqueville called America’s volunteer spirit.”

“That was sort of the genius of Trump. He realized that ordinary Republicans don’t give a crap.”

Bush nostalgia is in vogue these days, and Olasky’s remarks were the latest outbreak—part of an afternoon event he led at AEI on “What happened to compassionate conservatism—and can it return?” “Compassionate conservatism” was Bush’s campaign mantra when he first ran for president in 1999, and it ostensibly became his governing philosophy in the White House. That was thanks in part to Olasky, whom the former president called the “leading thinker” behind the phrase. As Johns Hopkins University political scientist Steven M. Teles wrote in a 2009 National Affairs piece, “The Eternal Return of Compassionate Conservatism,” the goal of this philosophy was “raiding liberalism’s political turf—and stealing Democratic voters.” It “encouraged Republicans to present themselves as allies of the poor and minorities, and to insist that ‘liberal elites’ in the Democratic party were the defenders of ineffective bureaucracies and a morally debased culture. Instead of embracing racial resentment, compassionate conservatism preached, Republicans should rebrand themselves as the party of racial solidarity—the allies of the moralizing agents of the inner cities.” This also had the advantage of strengthening the party’s appeal with white women in the suburbs, who were keen to see the GOP sand down some of its roughest edges.

Bush seemed sincere about compassionate conservatism and genuinely pursued it in some ways. He embraced immigrants and courted minority voters, both as governor and on the presidential campaign trail. He assembled a racially diverse cabinet. He accused congressional Republicans of trying to “balance the budget on the backs of the poor.” In his early White House years, education topped his compassionate-conservative policy agenda, including the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, along with faith-based initiatives and a guest-worker program for undocumented immigrants. But the broader agenda largely fizzled. After September 11, 2001, Bush turned his focus to foreign policy, most notoriously with his war of choice in Iraq. Then, President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 inspired a right-wing backlash and led the reactionary leaders of the Tea Party to reject compassionate conservatism in favor of calls for budget-slashing and “don’t-tread-on-me” libertarianism—all of which gave way to an overt politics of cruelty and white grievance in 2016, which President Donald Trump now embodies. “In some ways, we’ve seen the ascent in recent years of what I suppose could be called ‘callous conservatism,’” Olasky said Thursday.

Hoping for a revival of compassion on the right is understandable. America needs a healthier Republican Party and a morally sound conservative movement. But the term “compassionate conservatism” was tarnished by the Bush legacy, and there’s no evidence its substance is making a comeback anytime soon. In fact, AEI’s discussion speaks to what compassionate conservatism has been since the Bush years—a preoccupation of a small subset of conservative elites without much buy-in from voters. “The idea that the Republican Party should have something to say to African Americans in particular, and Hispanics somewhat subordinately, is a very important idea—not for the conservative base, but for especially the think-tank, public-intellectual side of the Republican Party,” Teles told me. “Their own sense of the legitimacy of the conservative project is related to the idea that it should have something important to say.” But it wasn’t important to the rank-and-file—and it wasn’t necessary to elect Trump.