Sometimes the world must be turned upside down to put it right-side up. The 2016 election is one of those times.

Donald Trump’s remarkable victory is a necessary tonic, a populist corrective to the arrogant misrule of the liberal establishment. The forgotten, left-behind and betrayed Americans did the political equivalent of using a 2-by-4 to get a mule’s attention: Sorry for the pain, but you weren’t listening.

Such is the encrusted elite’s ­addiction to power — they rarely share it and never relinquish it without a fight. The eternal genius of democracy is that it provides a peaceful way for others to take their fair share.

George Washington’s determination to walk away from the presidency after two terms set a noble precedent in this country about the voluntary transfer of power, though most of his successors would never have gone without a push.

That certainly includes the Obama-Clinton regime. Eight years of Hope & Change has put the nation on the verge of a crack-up, yet the royal court and its thieving band of grifters wanted more. Thankfully, Trump persevered against an unprecedented onslaught and voters in key states pulled the plug before a third term could take the country farther down a dead-end road.

In addition to Hillary Clinton’s other weaknesses, her vow to double down on President Obama’s most unpopular and burdensome policies motivated Trump voters. They were already fed up with a flat economy, job-killing taxes and regulations and the personal pain of ObamaCare, which had been imposed with a series of bald-faced lies and a single, party-line vote. Everyday people simply weren’t ­going to swallow any more, which is precisely what Clinton was demanding.

Yet this political revolution was more than a referendum on policy. If it had been that only, there were far better messengers than Trump.

The extra dimension was his and his supporters’ determination to also fight the suffocating cultural domination of a secular ruling class that has seceded from the concerns of most Americans. Instead of fixing big problems, bureaucrats decided to tell people what bathrooms they could use, how to run their businesses and what schools their children must attend. Dissenters were immediately labeled racists, haters and xenophobes.

This winner-take-all zealotry contributed to the deep cultural divide that is part of our national polarization, and it doesn’t ­always involve race or ethnicity. Charles Murray, in his enormously insightful book “Coming Apart,” examines the growing contrasts between the lives of ­upper-income whites and those of working-class whites.

To illustrate his thesis, Murray offers a quiz for readers that includes such questions as “Have you ever held a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?” He means “any part of the body that hurts because of physical labor,” and adds that “headaches don’t count, neither does carpal tunnel syndrome, nor does a sore rear end from sitting all day in front of a computer screen.”

Another question asks the reader to identify various military insignias and another asks whether you have any domestic beer in your refrigerator. Others want to know the education ­levels of your neighbors and whether any of your friends smoke cigarettes.

Your score determines how much of a bubble you live in, which gets us back to the election. The cluelessness in media and political circles about the Trump voter surge confirms that the ruling class is cosseted deeply in its bubbles and isolated from the concerns of other Americans.

And while Obama and Clinton gave gracious speeches yesterday urging an acceptance of Trump’s victory, it remains true that they and many of their supporters are chronic bubble dwellers. Both the president and his would-be successor have, while meeting with rich donors, expressed disgust with working-class backers of their opponents. No domestic beer for them!

For my money, that part of the national divide is the hardest to repair.

Trump and a Republican Congress can deliver long-overdue economic and tax reforms with new programs, legislation and better trade deals. But getting Americans to reach across the cultural chasm and see the other side’s grievances as legitimate and deserving of respect will be more elusive. As we saw in the campaign, politics is far better at exploiting differences than healing them.

Even worse, most of the media inflamed divisions by taking Clinton’s side and demonizing Trump and his voters. Indeed, the corrupt confederacy between some top journalists and the Clinton campaign that WikiLeaks revealed must be addressed by the news organizations involved if they have any hope of regaining the public trust they squandered this year.

That won’t take a miracle — only a decision by the bosses of those organizations to let their best reporters do an in-house ­autopsy. Let them air all the dirty laundry to cleanse their businesses.

If the bosses have the guts to demand the truth about themselves, perhaps they, too, would be shocked at the depths of professional depravity. That would be a good first step on the long road back to credibility.