The eternal frustration of every conservative is the way the public square is skewed in favor of liberals. “Right-wing extremism” is said to be a problem, but left-wing street riots are nothing but “peaceful protest.” We are to understand that anything less than a flat-out denunciation of loser David Duke and the pathetic remnants of the Ku Klux Klan is disqualifying while the accomplished racist agitator, Reverend Al Sharpton, gets White House invitations and fawning profiles in Vanity Fair.

We saw this game played on Friday March 11, when lefty protestors shut down a rally organized by presidential candidate Donald Trump. According to the mainstream media, the problem was Trump’s violent rhetoric; that’s what had provoked the Soros-funded protesters to their well-rehearsed rage. And the worst of it was that Trump’s Republican opponents chimed in agreeing with the left’s violent rhetoric meme.

No wonder Donald Trump is the darling of the white working class. He’s the only man in town with the cojones to stick it to the liberals. If only he weren’t just winging it.

Nobody has done this since Vice-President Spiro Agnew infuriated liberals with his talk of the nattering nabobs of negativism and President Nixon rallied the silent majority. Notice what happened to those two who dared to stick their heads up above the cultural rampart. It wasn’t pretty.

The awful truth is that nothing is going to change -- GOP establishment types are not going to get a backbone, real reform is not going to start until GOP candidates at all levels can confidently go on the cultural offensive and live to tell the tale.

Here’s how that would look: GOP candidate goes on MSNBC and calls Al Sharpton a racist thug who incited a race riot against Freddie’s Fashion Mart, and the MSNBC host quails in terror and changes the subject. Bernie Sanders proposes free college and health care and GOP candidate fearlessly go on CNN and ask the host whether just the Koch Brothers and the One Percent are going to pay for all this free stuff. Then they drop the hammer. Free college means ordinary middle-class Americans forced to pay for a bunch of rich kids learning how to harass ordinary Americans and deny them their free speech rights while working-class Americans can’t find jobs. This new generation of GOP candidates might well talk casually about trash Nazis, feminist Nazis, gay Nazis, and green Nazis, because calling liberals fascists would be wrong.

In other words, politics is downstream from culture, as Andrew Breitbart told us.

And not just Breitbart. In Revivals, Awakenings and Reform by William G. McLoughlin argued that great eras of reform are preceded by turbulent eras of religious revival, such as the Protestant Reformation that gave us the Thirty Years War, the Puritans, and the execution of the English Charles I; the Great Awakening that gave us the American Revolution; and the Second Great Awakening that gave us the end of slavery.

For lefties, the first great moral movement was the rise of the working class in the 19th century and the successful political reforms that gave us wage and hour laws, labor unions, and social insurance. It was following by the Civil Rights movement that brought traditionally marginalized groups like women and minorities to full participation in the political life of the nation and legislated equal pay, abortion rights and “marriage equality.”

Moral and cultural revolutions are one thing, but political reform involves government, and government is force. So any reform program is likely to provoke a reaction from the folks that find they are paying for the reform. The bourgeois revolutions in the years around 1800 advocated free trade and markets and named and shamed the poor with Poor Law reform. They provoked in England the Chartist riots of the 1840s. The Second Industrial Revolution provoked the industrial workers because industrial products were subject to international supply and demand. Workers rebelled against wage cuts and layoffs and heavy-handed attempts by their employers to respond to international markets.

You can see where our liberal friends might be sailing into danger. Their whole philosophy is that they are educated and evolved people who are thereby empowered to rule over us by regulation, executive action, and Supreme Court fiat. Opponents of their social agenda are racists, sexists, and homophobes beyond the pale and are to be fined and/or lose their jobs. But there may come a time when those racists, sexists, and homophobes might not like being oppressed and marginalized. They might decide to fight back.

For those offended by the crudities of Trumpism, think of the Trump phenomenon as a portent of the coming cultural revolution against liberal hegemony. It will empower GOP politicians from the president on down to rock loyalists of the liberal ancien régime right back on their heels.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.