Charles Dickens was a piker. He settled for “A Tale of Two Cities,” but when it comes to an age of foolishness, America thinks big. Through seasons of light and darkness, hope and despair, our presidential holy war is unfolding as a Tale of Two Front-runners.

One front-runner says outrageous things. He willy-nilly insults everybody from his rivals to whole religions. He never apologizes, even after boasting about his penis on live television.

The other front-runner does outrageous things. She risks national-security secrets, rewards donors with government favors and misleads the parents of dead heroes about why their loved ones died.

Guess which front-runner the media treats as the barbarian at the gate.

The fall folly looks as if it’s going to be Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton, but that’s the political surface. We are living through a clash of cultures, and the press is busy unloading its full arsenal of double standards.

But there’s a catch: The loaded treatment doesn’t always break along the usual fault lines of liberal and conservative. The split is over how much revolution America ­really wants and who gets to dictate the terms.

Trump, the unlikely leader of the pitchfork army, is a ratings and click-bait bonanza, but gets hit with Hitler and Mussolini comparisons from both left and right media because of things he says and the passion of his working-class supporters. Even people who know better were quick to blame him for the Chicago tumult, conveniently ignoring the fact that the protesters were vandals aiming to stop the event, not just voice opposition to Trump.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s blue-nosed brigade keeps her far from the ­reporting rabble as she milks her ­C-suite connections to browbeat big-media elites into a nonaggression pact.

The lopsided coverage comes with pictures. Look at almost any website, newspaper, magazine or TV, and Clinton is inevitably smiling a happy-warrior smile. Trump is just as inevitably glowering, his face flushed with anger, lips in a snarl.

She’s warm. He’s crazy.

She’s coddled on substance, too, and it wasn’t until last week, at the eighth Democratic debate, that she was asked the two toughest questions of the year. Will you resign if you are indicted, and did you lie to the families of the four brave Americans killed in the Benghazi terror attack?

Both questions came from moderator Jorge Ramos of Univision, who persevered despite audience booing at the Miami debate, a cue to Clinton that she could duck without penalty.

“Oh, for goodness — that’s not going to happen. I’m not even answering that question,” she shot back when Ramos cut off her attempt to filibuster the indictment question.

The exchange was extra unusual considering the source. Ramos, a liberal by every measure, initially disclosed that his daughter worked for Clinton. And his ultimate boss, Univision Chairman Haim Saban, contributed $2.5 million to Priorities USA Action, a Clinton super PAC, according to the Washington Post.

But his conflicts didn’t stop ­Ramos from going where others hadn’t, or maybe they propelled him to prove he isn’t neutered. ­Either way, his unusually tough questions to Clinton were a welcome contrast to routine media ­cravenness.

The operating bias is that her probable crimes and infidelity to important truths are treated as partisan piffles, while Trump’s every word is dissected and denounced as if he is a heretic who deserves to be burned at the stake. Somehow, his words are deemed far more egregious than her deeds.

One cartoonish New York tabloid regularly flaunts its prejudice, and did so again Friday. It treated a single punch thrown by a Trump supporter at a rally in North Carolina as the moral equivalent of World War III, devoting its cover and two full inside pages. But on a real life-and-death matter in New York the very same day, it offered only a few buried paragraphs when a shooting on a Brooklyn street left two teenagers wounded and sent scores of students scrambling for safety.

News? It all depends on whose ox you want to gore.

Much media loathing of Trump is a push-back against his wealth and casual assault on political correctness. Journalism’s social-justice monitors double as Democratic enforcers, and the GOP front-runner is a willful smasher of safe spaces and a walking, talking trigger warning. He must be destroyed.

Yet it’s not just gentry liberals who put a target on his back. Many equally situated conservatives are similarly appalled, and for similar reasons. They regard Trump as an all-purpose disrupter whose threat to establishment gatekeepers extends well beyond the calcified core of the Republican Party.

Although the nation’s polarization is supposedly the bane of all sensible thinkers, many newspapers, think tanks, magazines and publishing houses owe their existence to the culture and class wars that polarization spawns. And many conservatives in those foxholes have no more use for Trump than do liberals.

That’s not to suggest they should celebrate Trump just because he is a Republican. He clearly is out of his depth on many issues and has not taken the time even for crash courses. He is surrounded by a small political team, and his record is a mash-up of personal impulse and crony capitalism.

Still, the venomous backlash against him looks out of proportion to his deficits. The rejection, centered on the fact that he has never been an orthodox conservative and refuses to become one, strikes me as a mistake for two reasons.

First, the popularity of Bernie Sanders socialism among young voters is an alarming indication of how a big segment of the country is making another hard left turn. Instead of President Obama’s liberalism marking the last gasp of big government, the Sanders phenomenon suggests Dems see Obama’s commitments as a down payment. They want ever more redistribution and entitlements and Republicans must win the White House to stop them.

That leads to the second point, which is that Trump is right when he says his candidacy has sparked turnout and enthusiasm in ways the GOP hasn’t seen in a long time. Because he is the most likely nominee, and thus the only person standing between Clinton and the Oval ­Office, conservative thinkers could be rushing to help him better understand policy complexities and influence his decisions.

But they aren’t, instead flashing their “#NeverTrump” hashtags as badges of honor. I hope that doesn’t signal they are resigned to a President Clinton.

Perhaps she is acceptable to some because, as a known quantity on the left, she offers no existential threat to the culture wars as they exist. Trump, on the other hand, is a newcomer and apostate to the conservative faith who must be shunned for doctrinal purity.

There is little doubt that he would bring upheaval and uncertainty, while Clinton’s election would tilt the apple cart without upsetting it. With her in the White House, all the gatekeepers could settle in for four more years of trench warfare, and ­laments about polarization wouldn’t miss a beat.

The only loser would be America.