At the end of this week, liberals, your worst nightmare will be inaugurated as President of the United States, and the bust of Winston Churchill will be restored to the White House.

So let us all honor the spirit of Churchill. For liberals everywhere from CNN to UC Davis it is: in defeat, defiance.

But we conservatives must also honor Churchill: in victory, magnanimity.

So in the spirit of Churchillian magnanimity, I am going to tell you liberals where you went wrong.

I am going to help you liberals think about the bigger picture: how your whole worldview stinks, and how, as long as you don’t start to get a glimmer of this, you will continue to spread injustice and despair, from sea to shining sea, right across the fruited plain.

Let us look at three portents that are ringing like a firebell in the night. First of all, we learned last year from Jeff Bezos’ kids’ blog, no less, that the white working class is dying of despair. What happened? Then, we understand, African Americans are mad as hell, from Black Lives Matter to the Chicago Four, after eight years of the First Black President. How is this possible? In addition, we learn, the Women of America are going to march on Washington the day after Trump’s inauguration. Why? Three months after Kellyanne Conway, breaker of glass ceilings, was the first woman to manage a winning presidential campaign?

Do you notice the common denominator of these three groups? All three are, or have been, the little darlings of the left. Follow us, the left said to the workers, and we will bring you justice. Follow us, the left said to African Americans, and we will defeat racism. Follow us, the left said to women, and we will defeat sexism and the patriarchy. And liberals and lefties have been doing nothing but protesting and marching and legislating on these three fronts for the last 150 years.

So why are your little darlings so demoralized, liberals? Why is the working-class dying of despair despite your welfare state? Why are blacks killing cops and burning cities again, 50 years after the Civil Rights Acts? Why are women suffering sexual harassment on campus and huddling in safe spaces fifty years after the sexual revolution? Surely this couldn’t all be the fault of CEOs and KKKs and mansplainers, not when liberal activist groups have protested and marched and legislated all that time without even pausing for breath.

Here is a radical thought. These folks are mad and upset as a result of liberal politics, not because they are suffering from injustices that liberals haven’t yet demolished.

For instance, the political response to the rise of the working class has been almost entirely left-liberal: wage and hour laws, labor laws ending the old laws against combinations in restraint of trade, administrative government programs so that the working class wouldn’t have to worry their tiny minds about saving for a rainy day. If that just leads to despair, what’s the point.

We have spent 50 years enacting just about every liberal idea on the race question, including electing America’s First Black President, and yet said president just said that

After my election there was talk of a post-racial America. And such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic.

But that means, Mr. President, that the whole liberal program on race must be considered a failure. If you can’t solve the race problem with 50 years of nonstop race politics culminating in a black president, what’s the point?

Then women. We have spent the last 50 years and more enacting the liberal agenda on women, from no-fault divorce, to the sexual revolution, to abortion on demand, to making women the majority of college students, to getting girls into STEM, to making women into soldiers, police, and firefighters. And now women decide that it’s time to march on Washington?

How is liberal politics any different than World War I, when the generals sent millions to their deaths in one more identical Big Push after another?

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from all this, which I offer in the spirit of pure generosity and magnanimity. The lesson is that politics is a very blunt instrument; you can only use it to smash things. You cannot build a perfect world of peace and justice with politics and government.

I will give politics this: it can strike down the more egregious injustices suffered because of class, of race, and of sex. But as soon as you imagine that you can create justice with the force of government, you are going down a rabbit hole that will soon start to echo with the whines of disappointed lives and to reek with the stench of dead bodies.

I have an idea. Let’s throw out the entire liberal program and try something else. For a change.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.