We know why Trump won the 2016 election.  Apart from Hillary Rodham Clinton's frivolous itinerary for snowflakes, the Republican elite had willfully ignored offshore manufacturing's corrosive desolation of local communities and underrated the ricochet effect of Obama's radicalism.  Can this political critique by Trump's forsaken middle of the nation build a new conservative narrative, or will Trumpism be a mere four-year flash in the pan?  The viability of the Republic may be at stake.

According to political scientist Piero Ignazi, abandoned conservatives typically depend on a single charismatic leader, emerging beyond the party structure.  This leader attracts support through outspoken populist language (in Trump's case, his tweets).  Mobilization via mass rallies rather than grassroots participation is its defining characteristic.  Ignazi warns that seldom does the movement survive the leader's exit from the political arena. The party exploits the charismatic leader it often disdains to retain power for itself.

Recently, I received a request for money from the local Republican branch.  Instead of writing a check, I politely inquired why the people in charge had not organized street marches promoting Trump's agenda.  Where are the Republican-sponsored demonstrations for "Freedom of Speech and Peaceful Streets," for "All Lives Matter" and "Restore the Constitution," for "Drain the Swamp," "Cancel the Propaganda Curriculum," and "Prosecute the Slanderous Media"?  Not a peep in response.

Even more alarming than the party's tepid support for the president is the disloyalty of disaffected NeverTrumps.  They are grievously offended and have barricaded themselves in the Lincoln Project, which is currently airing television advertisements hostile to the president.  Their aim — "to defeat Donald Trump and Trumpism."  Following the lines of the left's demolition schedule, they plan to bulldoze Congress and the Senate (in order to save them), sparing only the RINOs.  Democrats, the MSM, and fatuous retired generals are applauding.

Consequently, Trumpism cannot trust the Republican Party.  However, all major Western political parties have become increasingly hierarchical and remote from their bases.  They are indistinguishable from the State's expanding apparatus of power.  They nominate its mandarins and pander to its clients (for a price), snubbing the sheep below.

A powerful corrective to this malaise of being passed over by political elites sprang up in the mushrooming of radical grassroots activist movements on the left, from feminist to green to Antifa to BLM.  Grassroots organizing surmounts that frustrated desire for direct political participation.  It provides a renewed sense of identity amid the chaos of tumbling institutions — the very institutions the grassroots activists have been directed to pull down by the post-truth "wokeness" of university professors!

Thus, the politicized NGO is both weapon and remedy.  Its most outstanding success was the 9/11 attack.  The Twin Towers were not only office space, but monumental statues memorializing American capitalism.  Organized Islamic cadres have furnished a state-of-the-art revolutionary model for insurrectionists to emulate, from toppling statues to proclaiming independent no-go zones to Ilhan Omar's call for the "dismantling" of entire economic and political systems.

The Democrat Party is now hostage to these deranged malcontents for its very survival.  It cannot move to the center.  Globalists, such as George Soros and GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), have taken full advantage of this phenomenon.  They have gilded anti-conservative NGOs to the hilt, handing over to them supervision of permissible speech, the purgation of civil institutions, and more recently swarming the streets with staged revolutionary pantomime and homicidal live theatrical events.

Why are there so few political mass organizations on the right?  Because moderate conservatives are guardians of historical heritage.  They wish to preserve the Republic's longstanding institutions and assumed they were already protected.  Wrong!  The left is hell-bent on razing them to the ground.  The Hill advises, correctly, that "[t]he conservative challenge is to activate [its] citizens.  As the Left proved ... this requires more than just television ads or digital campaigns.  Grassroots infrastructure is the crucial factor.  This, more than anything, is where conservatives need to invest."

During Obama's presidency, we saw the beginning of a viable grassroots conservative political movement in the Tea Party.  By weaponizing the IRS, Obama butchered that nascent movement (for which unconstitutional act he suffered no legal pain).  We cannot allow this to recur.

Heritage Action (affiliated with the conservative Heritage Foundation) is an exemplar of how to rescue Trump's conservatism from annihilation.  It combines inside-the-Beltway lobbying with outside-the-Beltway grassroots pressure through its Sentinel program.  Check it out.  There are others. Find one and participate!

Under brutal daily attack, Trump has championed an existential defense against the left's heinous program of "tearing down the system."  Bravely, he has sown a fresh field of conservative seeds, but he cannot singlehandedly guarantee the crop.  The left has militarized its grassroots.  Therefore, without a regiment of militant, conservative NGOs, we lack the necessary weapons to fight those who wish to despoil our crops and turn our Republic into a weed-choked wasteland.  Remaining for any longer "the silent majority" raises a white flag and loudly proclaims our surrender. 

Image: Ninian Reid via Flickr.