The big internal conservative struggle of 2017 will be the fight to write the narrative of how Trump emerged and why he lost. Anti-Trump conservatives will want to say that Trump lost because he wasn’t a “true conservative.” But 2016 to date is proposing that “true conservatives” constitute only a pitiful minority of the Republican Party, never mind the country as a whole. Why should any practical politician care about them ever again? To regain respect after their humiliation by Trump and the pro-Trump talkers on radio and TV, those who regard themselves as “true conservatives” will have to mount a show of force. “Maybe we can’t win on our own … but you can’t win without us.” And that means contributing—and being seen to contribute—to a Trump defeat…

The Trump campaign is a product of the moral collapse Levin discerns. It is built on some of the worst elements in American public life. It opens the door of American politics to the same kind of sinister influence from Vladimir Putin’s Russia that is being felt in France, Germany, Italy, and many smaller countries of the European Union. It preys upon the feelings of betrayal and loss—some justified, some not—so widespread in the poorer parts of white America. Trump has come so far because of the failings and self-seeking of Republican leaders, but he offers in their place only more glaring self-seeking and the certainty of even worse failures ahead.

Much of the old conservative message is out of date. Not all of it, but much. Yet the people who formed the conservative coalition remain. They’ve misplaced their faith and trust in Donald Trump. But then, it’s not as if their faith and trust were honored by the party’s plutocratic former leadership, either.

When it all ends as it surely must, the reaction will be intense and bitter. The only hope is to build one of those “attractive alternatives” that Levin prescribes, a new potential leadership structure that can truthfully promise post-Trump Republicans: