Olsen: The G.O.P. remains intellectually wedded to dying dogma. The congressional party really wants to do nothing other than cut taxes for businesspeople and the top bracket based on what can only be called religious devotion to supply-side theory. I do not think they represent their voters, and Trump’s nomination is proof of that. I think it will take a big defeat, though, before mainstream Republican pols start to realize the old ways aren’t politically sustainable. Just the sort of defeat that an inept reaction to last week’s election thrashing would create — and, boy, it sure looks like the first reaction might be exactly that!

Douthat: And yet in Steve Bannon, you have someone with real prominence who keeps saying that the party needs to change in something like the direction that you advocate — who talks about building a “workers’ party,” ditching libertarianism and even doing outreach to minority voters with economic-nationalist themes. But then when it comes to the specifics of his strategy, Bannon always seems more inclined toward seeking out racialized cultural fights, or linking himself to substance-free resentment vehicles like Roy Moore, than toward pursuing the economic-policy shift he’s officially in favor of accomplishing. What do you think of the frequent liberal argument that this is a problem inherent to right-wing populism — that the lurches toward race-baiting are inescapable, that the effort to build a pan-ethnic conservative populism is foredoomed?