If you are a card-carrying Democrat, the time has come to realize that the soul-searching prescribed by the media to the GOP must now be applied to your own party. You were not defeated by racism and sexism. Those are easy, sloppy malaprops which do nothing but obfuscate the fact that we have just witnessed a resurrection of the silent majority. It rose in demographics that were sharply divergent from what you believed was possible and took aim at a dual-party establishment which had grown complacent in its belief that it was firmly rooted. Refer to the Pew Research Center’s post-mortem and you will see that quite a large number of people who voted twice for Obama did indeed vote for Donald J. Trump who also garnered roughly the same share of female voters as Mitt Romney did in 2012. To suggest that Trump was elected solely by unseen hordes of angry, rural white men is tantamount to suggesting that our electoral process is rigged.

The truth is sometimes hard to swallow. But the simple truth, according to these same statistics, is that the demographic split with the most growth was college-educated versus non-college-educated voters, a divergence that has not been seen since 1980 when southern Democrats abandoned the party en masse. Yes. I know. One of the great causes of both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton was free-to-affordable college tuition, and as a long-term policy I understand it and support it. But, instead of tossing this up as a loss to those of lesser intelligence, perhaps consider the reality that your party’s lack of message (and success) with this position reflects a deep-seated presumptuousness that everyone shares your values.

The fact that this week has existed as an Alice-in-Wonderland moment for you is perfectly consistent with the disconnect created by a deep wealth/culture gap, as well as with the soft elitism that has infected your party’s establishment.