Who were the aboriginal?

Avik Roy—a former adviser to Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney—wants to rescue conservatism from Trump’s divisive tribalism. But can he persuade his party to join him?

Avik Roy, disaffected Republican, surveyed the upstairs room of a tony Palo Alto restaurant where a group of journalists and conservative intellectuals was sipping cocktails before a private dinner. “It’s like that scene inTitanic, ” he remarked to me, “where they know the ship is going down, and the conductor decides there’s nothing to do but keep the orchestra playing.”

In an alternate universe, Roy, who is 43 and whose first name is pronounced “Oh-vick, ” might be spending his autumn pushing policy papers as an adviser to Republican presidential nominee Marco Rubio. The dinner we were attending—the prelude to a policy seminar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution—might be teeming with excitement about the intellectual possibilities of a Rubio administration. Roy, a health-care expert who has advised Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney, once looked forward to 2016 as a year of Republican opportunity, when the party would choose a leader capable of reorienting it toward the future.