• Promote the benefits of global trade agreements, but help displaced workers.  • Rule out fully privatizing Social Security and Medicare, and reassure workers they will be exempt from cost-cutting.  • Acknowledge that universal health care is here to stay, but push for market-oriented changes.  • Disavow mass deportations and promote the economic benefits of legalizing longtime workers who are in the country illegally, but reduce the legal entry of less-skilled immigrants.  “What we have going on right now, and Trump’s position in the Republican Party, makes this recalibration that much more important, that much more urgent,” said Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah.  “Some within the party,” he added, “have been all too willing to wear the label of the Republican Party as being the party of Wall Street, or the party of the top 1 percent.”  Although most of them oppose Mr. Trump’s candidacy — Mr. Salam called him “an overwhelmingly noxious and negative force” — these conservatives do credit him with engaging working-class voters and dealing them into the economic conversation.  “The biggest thing that Trump offers these voters is finally somebody paying attention,” said Henry Olsen, a scholar at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center.  “Imagine that they’re the wallflowers at the high school dance and they’re sitting off, ignored by everybody. Suddenly, the football hero comes up and says, ‘Come dance with me.’ That’s intoxicating.”  Led by younger conservatives, the push for new approaches began in the past decade, as big spending and military interventions by the Bush administration and a Republican-controlled Congress vexed many in the party. Capturing the ferment was a 2008 book, “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream,” by Mr. Salam and Ross Douthat, who is now a columnist for The New York Times.  “The Trump phenomenon has really opened things up — people are more inclined to listen, elites within the party are more inclined to listen,” said Mr. Salam, who, with Mr. Douthat, recently updated their book’s theme in an opinion article in The Times.  The authors wrote in their Op-Ed that Mr. Trump’s white working-class supporters were “clearly voting against a party leadership that pays them lip service while ignoring their concerns” — a revulsion that will not disappear even if Mr. Trump does.  Proponents of a new conservative agenda have critics in both parties. Democrats dismiss their ideas as repackaging a familiar right-wing agenda. Some Republicans and conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh condemn their cause as a return of moderate Republicanism or a capitulation to liberalism.  Michael A. Needham, the chief executive of Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, said reform conservatives and Tea Party-oriented organizations like his are allies in their desire to rewrite a “stale” economic agenda tilted to Republican donors. But he acknowledged differences in tactics and substance. His group and its allies favor conflict, like government shutdowns, for instance. And they still want to repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut taxes for everyone.  Yet conservative agitators were mostly talking among themselves until Mr. Trump toppled the party establishment, along the way flouting longstanding party dogma on taxes, trade and immigration.  Democrats have long charged that lower-income white Americans who vote heavily Republican do so against their economic interests. A new poll for The Wall Street Journal and NBC News had Hillary Clinton ahead over all but trailing Mr. Trump by 13 percentage points among whites without a college education and by 21 points among men in that group. Past polls had her even further behind with those working-class voters, however.  Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week that the Democratic Party bore some responsibility. While its policies may be geared toward workers, he said, “The Democratic Party over all hasn’t spoken enough to those voters” — the “ordinary people busting their necks.”  It was an echo of the Republican self-criticism now playing out.  For all of Mr. Trump’s outreach to working-class whites, Robert VerBruggen, the managing editor of The American Conservative, said the party platform that emerged from the Republican convention was further evidence of the gap between the party’s support from white blue-collar workers and its agenda that all but ignores them.  “The breakdown of the working class was neglected,” he wrote in his magazine. “There seems to have been little discussion of the economic anxieties of working families, the safety net or the drug epidemic sweeping rural America.”  “Instead,” Mr. VerBruggen wrote, “their focus on the bottom half of the economic spectrum seems to have been limited to a debate about the purchase of unhealthy snacks with food stamps.”  Oren Cass, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the former domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, even suggested that Republicans look for ways to harness labor unions for constructive worker-management relationships. He also predicted more openness among conservatives to raising taxes when justified.  “It’s hard to imagine the Grover Norquist tax pledge having the salience it once did,” Mr. Cass said, referring to the longstanding anti-tax vow that most Republican candidates take. “That model of ‘no tax increases, ever, under any circumstances’ I think is probably on its way out or gone.”  Mr. Norquist scoffed at the suggestion. “The pledge came out in ’86,” he said. “Every six months from then somebody has said, ‘Oh, the pledge won’t hold.’ ” It is, he added, “nonnegotiable.”
Conservative thinkers have felt emboldened to press their party to reshape its canon to more directly benefit the workers it has often taken for granted.