Kyrsten Sinema might not be able to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shoot someone, and lose no support, but she could and did insult the very voters she was trying to woo and be the next duly-elected senator from the Copper State.

The former Green Party gadfly and 9th Congressional District Representative has at last been declared the winner of Jeff Flake’s departed Senate seat. She’s the first Arizona Democrat to win a Senate election in 30 years.

She’s also the first high-profile politician that I know who spent decades mocking her own constituents as drug-addled nincompoops, only to, in the end, receive their backing. Sinema’s record of contempt for her own people is nonpareil. The way she openly and endlessly complains about the loons in her state is akin to an elderly crank who never stops complaining about the one time the cable company once tried to upcharge him for Showtime.

A big smile conceals a inner sneer? (US House photo [cropped])

On multiple occasions, Sinema has referred to her home state as “crazy,” a “meth lab for democracy,” and an accursed place no good ever emerges from. Not once, it seems, did she ever stop to think how this obloquy reflects on her: an Arizonan, after all. One is reminded of Flaubert’s classic quote: “By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.”

Despite her best attempts to shower voters with disdain, Sinema defeated her opponent, Martha McSally, a decorated war pilot with the distinction of being the first woman to ever fly a U.S. Air Force combat mission. Perhaps the self-loathing Arizonan was right this whole time: Arizonans went with the pink-tutu accoutered Taliban sympathizer over a distinguished veteran. Quite a fine accomplishment for a state previously represented by the late John McCain.

Sinema’s low opinion of Arizona was not hidden. She’s been an elected representative for years. But opposition researchers didn’t disseminate the incriminating clips far and wide until the Senate campaign. Voters knew of their existence. They elected Sinema anyway.

The episode is reminiscent of the scene in “All the King’s Men” where Broderick Crawford’s Willie Stark rants and raves at the crowd, calling them all dirt-poor hicks, but wins their affection anyway. Stark’s shtick works because he, too, is an ignorant hayseed, kept down by otherworldly forces beyond his control.

Sinema is different. Like most liberals, she believes her intellect to be far above the average, her tastes more refined than the crude proclivities of the masses.

Which gets to the paradoxical truth about many left-liberals running for public office: Often times, they despise the very people they’re entrusted with representing. In more extreme cases, they’re hostile to the society in which they assume a leading position.

Sinema isn’t the only Democrat with an abiding disgust for her constituents. London Lamar, who was just elected to the Tennessee State House, had to apologize for calling her state “racist” and Republicans “uneducated” in a Facebook video she posted after winning her uncontested race. There was Barack Obama’s infamous quip about bitter laid-off factory workers clinging to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them” to make up for their failures. And then there’s the supercilious ice queen herself, Hillary Clinton, decrying Trump’s “basket of deplorables.”

The incongruent dynamic -- man or woman running for public office with unbridled scorn for the very electorate -- is one of the ways in which pure democracy is left failing. What bigger mark of failure is there than a social system that creates the means for its own destruction?

The irony of liberals’ open derision of voters is that it results in the exact electoral outcomes they try to prevent. Donald Trump won the presidency based largely on courting a constituency fed up with condescending urbanites. The United Kingdom voted to leave the Europe Union out of sense of inferiority: too many Brits felt unappreciated by bureaucrats in Brussels.

“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment...and on the love of country,” Alexander Hamilton wrote. Countries don’t survive when their leaders contemn the very citizens who constitute them. And they certainly don’t last long when voters, knowing full well their negative estimation, elect politicians who deplore them anyway.