It’s probably the case that the Trump and Carson campaigns are in downward trajectories that won’t be reversed. The polls don’t signal collapse in the wake of the insubstantial debate performances, but in each case the circle of support is shrinking. And, of course, Trump’s decision not to affirm that the president is not a Muslim, as well as Carson’s proclamation that we shouldn’t have a Muslim president, are unforced errors or worse that strengthen the trends toward marginalization. Someone else will be the Republican presidential nominee. So what are the top conservative public intellectual saying?

According to David Brooks, it’s great that the Republicans are morphing away from the temptation of nominating an outsider candidate. The most reality-based candidates are Lindsey Graham, Bush, and Kasich, but good enough is the now-likely ticket of Rubio–Fiorina. sn’t that sexist, given who actually killed the recent debate? Well no, David responds, because we don’t want too much light shining on her HP etc. record. And all this well before anyone who has actually voted! The good news, from David’s view, is that Republicans are free now from having to learn anything from the dissatisfaction that produced huge poll numbers of Trump and Carson. Republican complacency returns.

According to George Will, Americans should have nothing but contempt for the anti-American hatred of reason, science, and everything modern we find in the thought of Pope Francis. The pope is all about “medieval stasis,” which is the opposite of what America is for. I actually agree with a good number of George’s witty and incisive criticisms of the pope’s economic and environmental analysis. But I’m not about to say that the libertarian interpretation of modern science and techno-enthusiasm is simply what’s according to reason. And I’ll even add that’s not the American view, which is, for one thing, more faith-based and more republican (with a small “r”) than George has been for a while. There’s no one more complacently dogmatic than George Will 2.0.

Or, for that matter, anti-Catholic, insofar as no Catholic accepts whole hog the modern view that nature is simply something to be conquered in the service of indefinitely expanding personal autonomy.

Ross Douthat is actually more on to something when he says that it’s hard to know what Evangelicals see in the possible presidency of Ben Carson. Ross identifies well one of the ideological strands of Trump’s out-of-control campaign, which is a mainly economic (but also nationalistic and sometime nativistic) working-class rebellion against a complacently oligarchic party. But he doesn’t see that Carson, who, as much as Trump, has no business being president, stands for authenticity — and so not pandering — when it comes to the social issues that distinguish the Evangelicals. His support might be, if you think about it, another part of the working-class or ordinary-guy rebellion.

My takeaway: Our Peter S. was always right that Trump never had more than a ghost of a chance of being nominated, and sometimes I almost think we need a psychiatrist to understand all the Republican intellectuals’ over-the-top reactions to his entertaining but undisciplined, unevenly demagogic, and always highly vulnerable mode of campaigning. The bottom line might be that what Peter calls our donor-class party is too complacently the party represented by George 2.0. And so it doesn’t want to come to terms with the fact that conservatism has to be reformed in other than purely free-market and vaguely but insistently hawkish directions to be worthy of victory.

I’m doing the opposite of endorsing Trump or Carson here, but I do understand why people who aren’t vicious or crazy or brimming over with false consciousness might vote for either of them. And their success, even if ephemeral, is a teachable moment for the Republicans about what’s required to build a majority coalition. We might have President Romney today if Mitt had really learned from and acted on the fact that, despite his energy, money, and competence, he never really commanded the support of the rank and file of his party for the nomination. I am also not dissing Rubio as a possible nominee, given that among the mainstream candidates he seems to have the most reformist inclinations and promise, even with the authenticity problem Peter noted.

And let me repeat that the vetting process has just begun with Carly Fiorina. There’s her ”personal narrative,” of course. But I’m more interested in what she really stands for. I hope she’s all about change we can believe in.