The election results were definitive enough to give hope we may have just closed one of the worst chapters in American history. The political lesson of the Trump era has been glaringly obvious since he first came down the escalator: The system does not work for too many people, and those people want change. Instead of acknowledging this simple and clear fact, with all the implications it entails, America’s elites descended into a decade of insanity.

First, they tried like crazy to come up with any excuse for the first Trump win that didn’t require introspection or accountability. It must’ve been a divided primary field or the Russians or Mark Zuckerberg or the worst excuse: The American people who had just elected Barack Obama were now a bunch of racists. Everyone had their own scapegoat, none really grounded in reality.

Second, and more importantly, the issue set that grew out of the collective effort by establishment leaders of both parties to build an anti-Trump coalition will go down as the most insane in American history. People are upset about the economy, the waste, the corruption and the wars; the anti-Trump coalition’s response to that included policies that are going to look worse and worse with age, including:

No. 1: A war on merit. Decision-making in academic admissions and even corporate hiring is now heavily weighted toward immutable characteristics like race, gender and sexual preference instead of merit. It’s not hyperbolic to say this leads to the end of America as we know it.

No. 2: A war on free speech. The government and corporate efforts to blame social media for Trump, and therefore to regulate free speech, are Orwellian. Google search is rigged in favor of left-wing results. Besides X, major social platform algorithms are rigged to suppress independent-minded speech. This is just un-American. The fact that the Twitter files showed government officials promoting this censorship takes it to the next level.

No. 3: Breaking the immigration system completely and purposely. It was already horrible and in need of reform, but there is zero doubt that the people who raised their hands for open borders in the Democratic presidential debate purposely ended Trump policies to let in tens of millions of people with zero effective screening. Many D.C. Republicans went along with a sham border bill that would have enshrined insane levels of illegal crossings in order to lock in Ukraine funding, their real priority. The devastating impact of these policies on our economy, community and security was borne most directly by lower-income Americans of every race.

No. 4: Encouraging racial division and even rioting, including major multinational corporate funding of lunatic Marxist-led groups like Black Lives Matter.

No. 5: Extreme policies on transgender issues to the point that men are literally beating up girls in sports and children are undergoing life-altering sex changes before they’re old enough to get a tattoo.

No. 6: Virtually unlimited blank-check national security funding. Increasingly deadly offensive weaponry used against a nuclear-armed rival, risking existential conflict. Millions of innocents killed in the process. Bringing together former rivals like China, Russia and India. Endangering the role of the U.S. dollar in international finance while they’re at it.

This list could go on. These policies are collectively so crazy and utterly disconnected from people’s basic concerns about their families’ well-being, safety, security and future that normal people rebelled. Many don’t even particularly like Trump. They just dislike insanity more.

Where do we go from here? It’s up to America’s leaders how they want to handle this. They can choose to continue with willful blindness, or they can finally look inward.

You don’t have to be some crazed populist to see the problems. Every society has elites, but when the system becomes too stratified, when normal people can’t relate to the policies being foisted on them, when people sense that their personal interests aren’t driving their leaders, they respond with upheaval. Luckily for elite Americans, the upheaval here has been peaceful.

There are many good people stuck in a corrupt system. The first step for them is acknowledging the problem. Almost none did this after 2016. Washington is detached from average Americans and too dominated by huge multinational companies whose interests diverge with those of regular Americans. You can do their bidding or serve the voters, not both.

An outright majority of retiring politicians join the corporate influence business in one way or another. Washington doesn’t produce anything, yet it has many of America’s wealthiest suburbs. And those wealthy elites tried their damnedest, outspending Trump more than 2-1 on the campaign trail this time around, all for naught.

The big-box food companies are poisoning Americans under a regulatory regime they dominate. Big pharma has record profits as America gets sicker. Too many schools are broken, and too many teachers are pushing ideological garbage on our kids. Normal people want to fix all of this. Institutional Washington is in their way. The lesson of this election is all this has to change.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CEO of Tucker Carlson Network, co-founder and Publisher of The Daily Caller and co-founder and Chairman of The Daily Caller News Foundation, a nonprofit news company that trains journalists and conducts longer-term investigative reporting.