The nation’s cultural and political elite has been handed its walking papers by the American electorate.

What just happened is the most momentous shift in American political and cultural life in our time. There’s no way to digest the meaning of Donald Trump being on the verge of victory. Understanding it is the work of a generation.

Of course, we’re seeing desperate and pathetic efforts to declare the results illegitimate. For example, Paul Krugman of the New York Times said last night that Hillary Clinton’s loss was due to conscious efforts to suppress the African-American vote.

That idea is beyond preposterous and intellectually deranged. What we saw was a national wave that turned blue states red, not a case in which voter ID laws and efforts to restrict early voting changed the balance of a state or two.

We saw the populaces of America’s rural counties and exurbs — places Donald Trump visited and said had been neglected and forgotten and mistreated by America’s leaders — rise up practically in unison and vote for someone who said he would be the vehicle of their anger and the tribune of their restoration.

The other facile explanation is that James Comey is at fault for making public his examination of the new emails two weeks ago. If true, the fault goes back to March 2015, when Hillary Clinton’s illicit homebrew server became a matter of public knowledge and she began a Nixonian effort to lie and cover up and hide the evidence of her reckless behavior.

Barack Obama and all other Democrats saw the same things the American electorate saw here, and did nothing to stop Clinton from becoming their party’s nominee.

Their refusal to see what was right in front of their face — that Hillary was the uninspired, plodding, pluperfect representative of the mercantilist corruption against which Donald Trump was raging so successfully in the Republican race — allowed her to escape a real referendum on her behavior during the Democratic primaries.

And even so, she came close to losing the nomination to a 74-year-old back-bencher socialist.

The explanation is also ridiculous because a victory like this is the result not of evanescent events but rather the culmination of years in which the political stew of discontent was simmering until Trump brought it to a sizzling boil.

In other words, Trump didn’t win it in the past two weeks. He won it once he won the Republican nomination in the late spring. He won it the minute he came down the escalator.

He won it because he had something to say that resonated across the country and Hillary Clinton ran saying absolutely nothing other than that Trump was scum.

That’s why the confident folk who understood he would be the next president had shocking clarity while the rest of us were blinded by the steam rising from the stew. They thrilled to the way Trump threw all the ideological cards in the conservative Republican deck in the air and then went entirely on instinct about what was troubling America and what America needed to make it great again.

Everything disturbing about Trump is no less disturbing because of his victory. How this very divided America digests the changes he represents — both in the sharp zigzags on policy and the troubling example of a highly problematic and amoral resident of the White House — will be the subject of the opening chapter in a new age of American history.