YOU ARE STILL CRYING WOLF

Elections have consequences and an obvious one now is your distress. Your grief over Hillary Clinton’s defeat is understandable, but your rage over Donald Trump’s victory is not.

Yet instead of searching for the reasons, you embarrass the city by booing Mike Pence at “Hamilton.” You screech over Trump’s personnel picks and reflexively smear people you don’t know. Too often, your argument is “Shut up.”

You are playing with fire by hardening the very polarization you decry. Please stop before you burn down the American house.

By all means, mourn Clinton’s loss and the probability that you will never again see her name on a ballot. Her concession speech felt like “goodbye” and someone else will shatter the final glass ceiling.

While I am relieved Clinton will not be president, it is impossible not to feel for her on a personal level. Twice she was denied victory when it seemed inevitable, and there is no joy in imagining her pain.

But neither is there any appetite for her politics. Back in February, I wrote that, win or lose the nomination, Bernie Sanders “has already won the future of the Democratic Party.” My only mistake was in underestimating the extent of his victory.

With the Clintons out of the way, Dems are making a ferocious socialist turn, led by Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and presumed party boss Rep. Keith Ellison. Excepting Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, Dem leadership is embracing radical policies that make President Obama look like a centrist. With unrestrained ideology, it’s leftward, march.

That way lies more madness and defeat, and Republicans already hold more federal and state power than they’ve held in nearly 100 years. I urge you to open your eyes and hearts to better understand the revolution taking place in the America outside your bubble.

That’s not to deny that your rejection of Trump was reasonable. His thin skin is a concern and things he said and did were offensive.

His lack of experience presents a steep learning curve at a very dangerous time.

But the election is over, so let’s be fully honest: You don’t just reject Trump, you also hold contempt for his supporters. You belittle their concerns and demonize their resistance to your power. Among yourselves, you ask, how can they be so stupid to elect such a stupid man?

I hear such things, and it confuses me. I know you as warm and generous people, full of passion for your families and friends. You love America and share its bounty through charitable good works.

And yet, that contempt for certain less fortunate Americans is real. Such hate is anathema to the classical meaning of liberalism, and is often directed at an unknown adversary. So it is here, because most of you don’t actually know Trump supporters.

They are everywhere. They are checkout clerks in supermarkets, they fix your car, deliver your packages and maybe watch your kids.

Some are doctors and many own small businesses. Too many are unemployed.

They are the soldiers who defend you, the farmers who produce your food and the cops you trust. When you call 911, the first responders are probably Trump voters.

They are essential to your lives, but you are ignorant about theirs. Except when you need them, you probably don’t notice them.

Actually, you don’t really hate them, either. What you hate is the caricature of them the Democratic Party and the national liberal media created, and that you swallowed, hook, line and sinker.

You fell for the oldest trick in the propaganda playbook. Obama, Clinton, Hollywood and their media handmaidens “otherized” tens of millions of hardworking, God-fearing Americans, and you said amen.

These hucksters turned anecdotes into universal truths. They found a racist or heard an anti-Muslim comment at a Trump rally and bingo, declared an entire movement bitter clingers, deplorables and irredeemables.

You accepted the caricature because it fit the stereotypes reinforced in your closed circle. It has ever been thus for the smart set.

Here’s Time magazine describing the 1932 Democratic convention that nominated FDR: “Like Irish potatoes and more noxious growths were the city delegations — Tammany’s full-blown ward heelers, micks from Brooklyn and Boston, hybrids from Chicago . . . lusty bumpkins from Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana and drooping-gone-to-seed specimens from the country roadsides.”

Minus the flair, that’s pretty much how the New York Times, MSNBC and this year’s version of Time described Trump supporters. They lied to you.

If you must be angry, be angry at them. They are the great deceivers, and they haven’t stopped.

You are better people than that. Declare your independence from partisan propaganda and go see for yourselves the truth about America.

For its sake, and yours.