David Frum is a man of his word. Four months before the election of Donald J. Trump, the Atlantic columnist announced he was forming a one-man brain trust to save the GOP. “The party of reasonable conservatism I grew up with,” he claimed, “died a long time ago.” Seeking his own “exit from Trumpocracy,” Frum hoped for the party’s “reintegration into a politics again founded on decency.”

Frum was hardly alone in his quest. One of the most persistent features of three years of Trumpmania has been the search for a political species now considered a rare breed: the “reasonable conservative.” Highly educated but not aristocratic, the reasonable conservative recognizes norms and values and refuses to calumniate opponents. Above all, they’re firm believers in procedural democracy and the necessity of constitutional safeguards.

There was a time when such a marriage between conservatism and democracy was far from evident. Edmund Burke derided the democratic system as “the despotism of the multitude,” while Arthur de Gobineau thought democracy equal to “mobocracy.” Others were less civil — democracy, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed, was nothing less than “the rule of the rabble.”