This week we saw a few perfect examples of why liberal coastal elites are so resentful of middle America: It’s because the supposed rubes and rednecks aren’t more resentful of the elites — or, more specifically, the elites’ “success.”

They don’t aspire to be like their self-appointed betters.

Some Americans just don’t need much; they don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to have a 1,500-square-foot house, watch football and go to church on Sunday. They don’t want to leave their hometowns to come to Silicon Valley or Washington, DC, or Manhattan. They place great value on community and living near family and carrying out family traditions.

That’s not hate, that’s not stupidity, that’s not racism — it’s their own version of the American dream.

On Monday Ned Resinkoff, a senior editor for the progressive ThinkProgress, wrote in detail about how rattled he was that his plumber, “a middle-aged white guy with a southern accent,” may have voted for Donald Trump.

The idea that his plumber may have different political beliefs left Resnikoff so rattled he “couldn’t shake the sense of potential danger.”

Two days earlier Melinda Byerley, founder of a Silicon Valley-based tech startup that does “free-range, artisanal, organic, customized marketing” with “Birkenstocks-on-the-ground expertise,” tweeted her expert opinion on Middle America’s jobs-`attraction problem.

It wasn’t very nice.

First she said Middle America needs to realize “no educated person wants to live in a s- -t-hole with stupid people,” which is why she said more big corporations don’t move to the Heartland: “Those towns have nothing going for them,” with “no infrastructure, just a few bars and a terrible school system.”

Educated people such as herself wouldn’t live in rural areas because they won’t sacrifice their superior tolerance and diversity to do so. Nor do her highly educated friends want to live in states where the majority of residents “don’t want brown people to thrive.”

Related Video Video length 1 minute 12 seconds 1:12 Meryl Streep used her Golden Globes acceptance speech to attack Trump Meryl Streep used her Golden Globes acceptance speech to attack Trump

And of course there was Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes acceptance speech, railing against Trump and his voters — delivered in a bejeweled dress in the company of people draped in clothing worth millions of dollars in an auditorium that looked like Versailles.

‘We always suspected that these people felt this way, but now they are not even hiding behind the façade anymore.’

Her rip on people who prefer football and mixed martial arts as entertainment over high-art film was also telling.

Their comments are the exact kind of sneering condescension that provoked the election’s anti-elitism backlash, said Bruce Haynes, a GOP strategist in Washington. “And what is interesting is that we always suspected that these people felt this way, but now they are not even hiding behind the façade anymore,” he said.

Most Americans simply don’t want or desire the same things that these people hold up as valuable; they don’t need a mansion, they don’t rack up frequent-flyer miles. They want different things — a place to live, a decent job, education for their kids.

It’s more than enough for most people.

But Streep and Byerley and Resinkoff and the people who were cheering on their screeds cannot imagine being satisfied with any of that, because their universe is so different.

So they bite back. They make fun of Main Street — their values, their way of life, their pace of life, the towns they live in, the football games and martial arts they enjoy and the professions they have chosen.

They’re racists, uneducated people to be feared. And the divide deepens.

“If you don’t engage in the things I care about, or desire the things I desire, there is something wrong with you” was how Haynes characterized the attitudes expressed toward Main Street.

Regular folks have had enough. Less ambition doesn’t make them lesser Americans, yet that’s exactly the way they’re treated. Arrogant liberal elites take this personally, because they interpret it as a critique of the sacrifices they’ve made to get to where they are.

The left-liberal pundit class loves to hear stories of rural Americans who moved to the big city and look in their rearview mirrors with shame and trepidation, like their small-town upbringing is a skeleton in their closet. What they can’t abide is average Americans’ pride.