Hillary Clinton can’t say she didn’t warn us.

In a 3,500-word essay on “The Weaponization of Loneliness” in The Atlantic, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate says her jejune 1996 book, “It Takes a Village,” forecast the country’s current crisis of loneliness and offered still-relevant solutions.

And, oh yeah, hapless lonely people exploited by authoritarian right-wingers basically kept her from the White House in 2016 (and here you thought it was Russia).

Now, social isolation is a real social problem in America, as Hillary correctly recounts in her essay, and it has contributed to the Trump phenomenon. But that it has been uniquely weaponized against progressives, or that conventional progressive policies are the antidote to this deep-seated phenomenon is as absurd and self-serving as you’d expect from a woman who managed one of the more shocking losses in U.S. presidential history and has been offering excuses ever since.

In her telling, an army of so-called incels, or involuntarily celibate men, organized by Steve Bannon is part of a growing threat to U.S. democracy.

Rather than shadowy forces, from Russian hackers to Bannon’s a-socialized acolytes, determining the course of the country, it is the middle of the electorate that remains crucially important, and it is open to persuasion on the big questions.

To read Hillary, you might think that no one who supports the Democrats is ever lonely.

As it happens, Republicans are the party of married people. As Conn Carroll pointed out at The Washington Examiner, in the 2022 House races, Republicans won married men by 20 points and unmarried men by 7, and won married women by 14 points. The GOP, on the other hand, got wiped out with unmarried women by nearly 40 points.

According to a Gallup survey in 2020, 41% of single people reported being lonely the day before, whereas only 16% of people who were married or in a domestic partnership said the same thing. New England has the highest rate of loneliness, and big cities are significantly more lonely than rural areas.

This means that Hillary forged a coalition of the lonely (or at least the more lonely) in 2016, and the worst thing that could happen to her party is more people getting married and living in small places with a stronger sense of community.

Of course, Hillary doesn’t offer either of those as potential solutions to the crisis of loneliness. She’s heartened by parents protesting “book bans” and workers engaged in union organizing. Left-wing activism, apparently, is what can knit us all back together.

She invokes “the wisdom and power of the American village,” and says, “we have more in common than we think,” without ever giving any sense that she acknowledges the values of the other side.

She’s a case study in the myopic self-righteousness of the left. It’s no wonder that if Hillary’s “village” is the community on offer, millions of rational, happy Americans want nothing to do with it.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review