Can Republicans be party of business and blue-collar?

The movement known as national conservatism, which just wrapped up its latest conference in Florida, is the third major attempt to solve the Republican Party’s central 21st century policy dilemma: How does a party that historically represented the rich and big business adapt to a world where conservatism’s constituencies are not just middle class but blue-collar, downscale and disappointed with the modern American economy?

The first attempted adaptation belonged to George W. Bush. His slogans were “compassionate conservatism” and the “ownership society,” and his policies offered new spending on education and health care, support for faith-based anti-poverty programs and easy credit for new homeowners — all theoretically designed to foster self-sufficiency rather than dependence, building a conservative alternative to the liberal welfare state.

After Bushism came to grief in the housing bubble and the financial crisis, the second adaptation had its hour: so-called reform conservatism, which imagined itself (I was one of the imaginers) as harder-headed than Bushism, offering a suite of technocratic fixes to increase economic mobility and improve middle-class life — and especially middle-class family life — without blowing out the federal budget.

This budget-conscious wonkery seemed poised to influence a Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio administration — before it was simultaneously outbid, absorbed and shattered by Donald Trump. Trump went well to the reformocons’ right on some issues (reform conservatism wanted a pivot to skillsbased immigration policy; he just promised to build a wall) and well to their left on others (reform conservatism wanted to meanstest entitlements; he promised to protect them), while emphasizing issues like trade and industrial policy that had received less attention from the wonks. And almost all of this he did instinctively, following long-held impulses rather than any think tank agenda — which meant that conservative intellectuals found themselves trying to backfill a Trumpist program into his chaotic administration.

National conservatism represents the fullest version of this effort. It’s more philosophically ambitious than its compassionate-conservative and reformocon predecessors; its impresario, Yoram Hazony, claims to have rediscovered a consistent nonliberal and nonauthoritarian Anglo-American conservatism, rooted in our elite’s long-discarded conservative-Protestant heritage, an argument he advances fascinatingly, if not entirely persuasively, in his recent book, “Conservatism: A Rediscovery.”

But on the policy side, the basic question his movement is reckoning with hasn’t changed since the Bush era: How does the Republican Party, which is still the party of free markets and tax cuts, represent and support its working-class constituents?

Broadly speaking, the national conservative answer has been to combine the Trumpian emphasis on trade and industrial policy with the reform-conservative emphasis on family policy, with some trustbusting impulses added in as well. It’s a vision in which conservative governance supports skilled blue-collar jobs, domestic industry and parents of young children, while seeking to weaken the power of the Ivy League and Silicon Valley.

But having lived through several cycles of attempted right-wing policy realignments, I have a sense of the challenges that can make these ventures falter.