For those of us concerned that a President Trump would weaken America because he isn’t authentically conservative, Christian or pro-life, it’s easy, comforting and absolutely useless to respond to his political success by falling back on any of these four common coping mechanisms:

1. Denial: This can’t possibly be happening. No one I know is voting for Donald Trump. It will all blow over as soon as the GOP field thins out and sane people wake up to the danger.
2. Rage: Americans I counted on, who I thought shared my principles and faith, have betrayed me and America, and proved they’re not really Christians or conservatives.
3. Contempt: The rednecks, Rust Belt losers and closeted white supremacists have grabbed the steering wheel. We need to shove them back into the trunk, and coast to victory.
4. Despair: I did my best to warn people, but now they’re giving in to the lower angels of their nature, and there’s nothing I can do. I will sit back, tend my garden and watch the carnage — which will only prove how right I was all along.

I sympathize a little with each of these responses, because hey, I’m only human. I even get the feelings of some Trump supporters, who are gloating right now at the end of the Bush dynasty and the demonstrated helplessness of the GOP establishment. But at some point we must gird our loins, cinch our belts, and walk in the open air of sweet reason. We are right to point out the things that Trump is wrong about — as conservative writers have done over many months. But that only goes so far.

Solid conservative writers have already explained many times and in many places the subjects on which Trump is either muddled or mistaken:

• Free trade
• Private property and eminent domain
• Planned Parenthood and right to life
• Executive power and its limits
• The importance of civility in public life

That’s quite a list. In calmer times, it ought to be disqualifying. But in case you weren’t looking, that’s not our world. Instead we live at a time where millions of Muslims are inundating Europe with the approval of Europe’s governments and the pope — to choose just the maddest example from current events that seem to have leapt from a dystopian right-wing novel. I could list many more, from students squelching free speech on campus to the “transgender” attack on the most basic facts of human biology. This is a radical time, and would-be leaders who don’t seem to realize that will simply get tossed over the side — as Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush were.

Many of Trump’s fans may support him no matter what. For them policy arguments are beside the point. But we need to understand what rational voters think Trump is right about, and see if we can accommodate those truths, and articulate them in a more balanced, rational way. If any candidate is going to deny Donald Trump the nomination — a very big “if” at this point — he will need to convey to these voters that he sees these truths as well, and will account for them in how he would govern. Fend those truths off with denial, rage, contempt or despair, and you hand Trump the nomination, on a really classy silver platter.

So let’s look at one big thing that Trump is sort of right about — where he is articulating an important insight that conservatives recognize instinctively and see him as speaking up for bravely, an insight that GOP elites have ignored or misunderstood for decades.

Multiculturalism and Promiscuous Immigration

Thanks to a law written by Ted Kennedy and passed in 1965 at a time when the U.S. enjoyed exploding job growth in manufacturing meccas such as Detroit, our country accepts more than a million immigrants per year, without any regard for its economic or cultural needs. That law favors migrants with large extended families, and thus encourages immigration from poor countries with high birth rates and low levels of education. We also do a half-hearted job of keeping out illegal immigrants, whose U.S.-born children are citizens, and can thus serve as “anchors” preventing their parents’ deportation, and as “magnets” for billions of dollars in public assistance. Indeed, some 51 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants receive some form of welfare.

The constant importing of low-skill workers may spur economic growth in some sectors, but it may keep flat the wages of native-born working class Americans of every race — wages that have been flat for almost 40 years.

At least that is what many voters believe. The economic details are actually more complex than most people assume. Long term, we all enjoy the benefits of globalization, despite all the hand-wringing about outsourcing. The jobs economy isn’t a zero-sum game, a point that seems to escape many voters and politicians. To hear many people talk, you’d think there were only a set number of jobs and no more. In fact, humans not only fill jobs, including jobs that non-immigrants might not otherwise do; they create jobs indirectly through consumption and directly through entrepreneurial activity. But if government policy discourages job creation and has a welfare system that entices many low-skilled immigrants to devolve into mere takers, you get stagnant growth and exploding federal deficits, not rising wages and a dynamic jobs market.

And as conservative philosophers Edmund Burke and Adam Smith knew, human beings are more than economic creatures. They have ideas, beliefs, prejudices and habits — not all of which are easily compatible with a political system that was invented for a tolerant citizenry. What is more, the political culture of Americans in the “great age of immigration” (1850-1924) was fiercely self-confident. Our institutions were strong and we believed in them. We expected and demanded that newcomers from alien cultures learn our language, adopt our political philosophy and pay their own way — or else go back where they came from.

The very idea that bigoted Muslims (or nationalistic Mexicans) would arrive in the United States, demand that our public schools accommodate them and that TV commentators avoid offending their sensibilities, while they collected public assistance, would have been inconceivable to Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley or even Franklin Roosevelt. To the credit of millions of Americans, it seems absurd to them as well these many decades later.

And now in their inchoate way, these Americans are voting to stop what they rightly see as an expensive exercise in destabilizing their country, culture and economy. Any viable alternative to Donald Trump had better get this and, more than this, be able to demonstrate that he gets it and will fight for it, or the Trump train will roll right on through the GOP convention.