The harshest critics of the United States are the best arguments for it. Take the latest iconic critic, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has a predictable list of complaints against America.

Fortunately for her, her family got to mainland America as quickly as possible. They apparently assumed that US institutions gave them economic opportunities unknown in Puerto Rico.

The fact that her father was an architect, that AOC herself ­received scholarships to attend pricey Boston University and that she was elected to Congress bore out her parents’ assumptions of a meritocracy, not a caste state.

The same could be said of two other chronic ankle-biters of America, newly elected Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Their families correctly assumed that Muslims would enjoy a higher standard of living and greater political freedom as minority citizens of the United States than as part of the majority in either Somalia or the Palestinian territories.

Omar and Tlaib know that if they were to redirect animus to the governments and societies of Somalia or the Palestinian territories, their freedoms, if not their very lives, would be in danger.

Transfer US paradigms from frigid Minnesota to balmy Somalia, and Omar would never have left Mogadishu. Put Somalian protocols in play in Minneapolis, and she and her family would never have set foot in America.

The reason she seems unable to acknowledge that simple truth is also Western to the core — once a pampered Westerner, she gains the leisure, affluence and security to critique the very system that provided these boons.

Newcomers to the West, emulating the hipster progressive left, sometimes lodge almost immediate complaints about Western civilization, usually the boilerplate that it is racist, biased and sexist. But one wonders: Given the tribal nature of man, compared with what?

Is the West religiously intolerant compared with most of the Muslim world? If so, try building huge Christian cathedrals in Saudi Arabia as counterparts to the current new monumental mosques in Cologne and Rome. Is the contemporary West racist compared with China? Sexist or homophobic in comparison to Iran?

The West, unlike most of the rest, is hypercritical of itself — sometimes nihilistically so. Unfettered skepticism, empiricism and inductive dialectic are the West’s great strength, whether expressed in scientific discovery, technological advancement or social and political policy.

Yet when self-criticism for the sake of self-examination is done to excess, it can become a liability.

The resulting Western message that insidiously reaches non-Westerners can become paradoxical. No sooner do the foreign poor and the oppressed reach their promised Western refuge than they are often assumed to be unsophisticated, unaware, unenlightened and “unwoke” if they don’t immediately press claims as “marginalized peoples” against a supposedly fatally flawed West.

The central paradox, indeed, the Achilles’ heel, of the West has always been twofold.

One, the marriage of market capitalism with unfettered freedom ensured by popular constitutional government creates untold affluence and leisure, leading to excess.

The result can soon lead to an unreality, in which the Westerner assumes that his bounty is limitless, that it is his birthright and that it is on a trajectory that will soon ensure utopia.

The Western progressive, perennially frustrated and disappointed about stubborn human nature, is constantly rooting out imagined impediments to the rule of his god Reason. One cannot be merely good, when he can and should be perfect — or else.

Second, freedom and equality, the twin pillars of Western society, aren’t always complementary. More often, they are at war with each other. The ancient compromise is tenuous, since it accepts inequality as the price of personal liberty.

Too often, Western arrogance about its undeniable accomplishments leads governments to imagine that citizens can and must be equal in every aspect. Messianic rationalists insist that inequality can be addressed only by government-mandated material redistribution or coercion.

Such efforts are contrary to human nature and often result in disastrous social and political polices, leading to impoverishment and collapse.

In other words, if the utopian agendas of many current critics of the West had been realized in the past, then Omar’s or Tlaib’s parents would probably never have wished to head westward in the first place. After all, why flee from what you find intolerable to what you soon find ­intolerable?

Victor Davis Hanson is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of “The Case for Trump.” This column was adapted from National Review.