For those who read my Monday essay predicting Donald Trump's epic win, the only thing less surprising than his triumph was the media's surprise it happened.

With a few exceptions, our self-appointed national elites remain utterly clueless about the nature of the nation they purport to lead.

They think Americans are happy with an economy that downgrades work with your hands and overcompensates work with your mind.

They think Americans want more dissolution of traditional norms, and the faster those are destroyed the better.

They think Americans want to care more about suffering people overseas than hard-pressed people at home.

They think Americans are as obsessed with race and gender as they are, and America is a place that represses diversity rather than one that celebrates and enables it.

They are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Americans who voted for Trump don't see his victory as the end of American democracy; they see the perpetuation of the elite dominance of the country's cultural and economic lives as the repudiation of it.

What part of "all men are created equal" don't the elite understand?

The American people know this promise is both "self-evident" and the beating heart of American life.

The American people know this promise is real, today, even if it remains imperfectly applied (we are fallible human beings, after all).

The American people want what Americans have always wanted: a government strong enough to remove burdens they can't remove themselves and then get the heck out of the way.

The American people see no contradiction between traditional norms and human liberty and diversity.

They want freedom and responsibility.

The American people want a government that respects all Americans' livelihoods, not one that showers favored classes with tax breaks and subsidies and overloads people who don't graduate from college with taxes, regulations and sneering.

Most of all, the American people are tired of those with high incomes and secure lives telling them their lives are inferior.

"All men are created equal" means equal opportunity, equal treatment under the law and equal respect.

The American people know Trump, for all his faults, shares their values.

And they know that for all their learning and power, the media, government and academic classes largely don't.

Trump would be wise to govern firmly but not obtusely.

Keep his promises and fight his enemies but recognize that many who oppose him today can become allies tomorrow.

America's greatest presidents -- Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Reagan -- understood this.

They all turned a minority party into a force that dominated American politics for decades after they left office.

Trump and his vice president-elect, J.D. Vance, have the opportunity to usher in a fifth Great Realignment, one that will take the new Republican plurality among voters -- the first since 1932! -- and make it a new American majority.

All of this is possible now because the American people kept the faith with America and rejected the siren song of pedigreed aristocrats on Wall Street, in ivory towers, Hollywood and the legacy media.

What a wonderful time to be alive in the greatest country in the world.