But if Trump has moved the GOP towards nationalism and nativism, why can’t he—or a future Republican leader—move it back? They could, but it won’t be easy because the Republican coalition has changed. Between 1992 and 2016, the percentage of whites with college degrees that identified as Republicans dropped five points. Over that same period, the percentage of whites with a high school degree or less who identified as Republicans rose 18 points. Blue collar Republicans are far more hostile to immigration and free trade than their white collar counterparts. And as Walter Russell Mead has famously observed, they tend to be “Jacksonian” on foreign policy. When they feel threatened, they support ferocious military attacks. But they have little appetite for expending blood or treasure on behalf of international norms or commitments from which they perceive little personal benefit.

As Ron Brownstein correctly notes, these views are still underrepresented in Washington, where corporate interests and a hawkish foreign policy class push the GOP towards internationalism. But over time, the shift among grassroots Republicans will reshape Washington institutions that rely on conservative eyeballs or small-donor donations.

Ten or even five years ago, the Weekly Standard was more influential than Breitbart. Now it’s the reverse. Listen to Fox News these days and you’ll hear little enthusiasm for the war in Afghanistan and a lot of enthusiasm for keeping Afghans out of the United States.

Over time, nationalist conservatives will even develop an intellectual class. In January, a former student of the influential conservative Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield created a journal called American Affairs to give Bannonism intellectual heft. The job of neoconservative intellectuals, Irving Kristol once claimed, is “to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong.” As ordinary Republicans move in a nationalist and nativist direction, nationalist and nativist intellectuals will emerge to do the same thing.