Conservatives have tried to preserve religious values, class-based social systems, the concept of the “Western democratic order.” They gave the oldest political party in England its name. In America, freed from ties to monarchy or aristocracy, they tried to cast in amber the ideals they believed animated the nation’s founding. Conservatism has told us again and again that what came before us was most likely better than what will follow, and that old ideals are the basis of who we are as a people. Buckley, the founder of National Review, was a self-described conservative, believing that, as the conservative theorist Peter Viereck once wrote in The Times, “freedom depends on the traditional value-code of the West.” So is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. So is Mitt Romney, who during the 2012 presidential campaign called himself “severely conservative.”

Is Donald Trump? As of last year’s Republican primaries, an array of “Never Trump” conservatives were arguing that the candidate wouldn’t merely be a bad president but a liberal one, ramping up the federal deficit and taking leftist stances on health care, L.G.B.T. rights and foreign policy. His very temperament, with its lack of humility or restraint, was said to go against the fabric of conservatism. But many voters didn’t share these worries: In Election Day exit polls, 81 percent of those who described themselves as “conservative” said they had voted for Trump. The modern licentiousness that conservative figures used to condemn, the promises to use government power in ways that would normally unsettle conservative ideologues — voters could embrace these, so long as it appeared to benefit them. Their politics weren’t those of William F. Buckley; they were those of Donald J. Trump.

What my time at that student paper taught me is that conservatism has long had two faces — one for its ideological elites and another for its voters. Its intellectual class debates free markets and constitutional law, but the message for voters is consistently different, full of sinister socialist plots and black welfare recipients soaking up tax money. The conversations I had in our office on Sunday afternoons took place against a backdrop of complaints about “liberal fascism,” of unceasing racial rhetoric in every publication and comments section, of the national anti-liberal student group Young Americans for Freedom planning a gathering in the center of our campus for “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day.”

Trump rejected only half that equation: the elites who believed their ideas determined the trajectory of conservative thought. He excised the ideological middlemen and spoke directly to voters, who did not need to wrestle with coherent principles or define the nature of the relationship between citizen and state. They were free to decide that universal health care and copious use of executive orders were conservative values after all — and when they did, the very people whose entire careers had depended on carefully defining and nurturing the conservative movement would come to look like liberal shills. As Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona said late in October, announcing that he would not seek re-election: “It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative” — a believer in free trade, limited government and all the rest — “has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican Party.”