Maureen Dowd’s effort to prove herself a card-carrying member of the proletariat would have been unnecessary a decade ago, and rings peculiar today.

Then this week, lefty Twitter erected a digital guillotine because I had a book party for my friend Carl Hulse, The Times’s authority on Capitol Hill for decades, attended by family, journalists, Hill denizens and a smattering of lawmakers, including Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins.

I, the daughter of a D.C. cop, and Carl, the son of an Illinois plumber, were hilariously painted as decadent aristocrats reveling like Marie Antoinette when we should have been knitting like Madame Defarge.

She was swiftly excoriated on twitter for being tone-deaf, as one would expect of the decadent aristocrat. Someone pointed out that her father was a DC cop in the age of segregation. And a defender, noting that reporters having relationships with people in power was an age-old means of getting information, was attacked because it wasn’t in furtherance of “objective journalism,” but “a bourgeois ideology rather than a description of anything real and true and objective.”

The new “real and true and objective” is using journalism to push the social justice agenda, even if the new proletariat “objective” makes no mention of facts or reality. So why made Dowd feel compelled to prove her prol cred in this peculiar manner?

After I interviewed Nancy Pelosi a few weeks ago, The HuffPost huffed that we were Dreaded Elites because we were eating chocolates and — horror of horrors — the speaker had on some good pumps.

In the future workers Utopia, everyone will wear Birkenstocks and eat only vegan chocolate substitute?

Yo, proletariat: If the Democratic Party is going to be against chocolate, high heels, parties and fun, you’ve lost me. And I’ve got some bad news for you about 2020.

Boom. That’s a declaration of war, and the twitter outrage over good pumps last week will be nothing compared to Dowd being ripped to shreds for backing this femme Hitler-wannabe, Nancy Pelosi.

The progressives are the modern Puritans.

The particular problem at issue at this particular point in time is that the left demands that Trump be impeached, and that means Pelosi, as speaker of the House, has to let, if not make, it happen. But their tactics is to attack her shoes and snack food choice, as reflecting her detachment from the warriors for justice manning the barricades.

They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough while placing all their hopes in a color-inside-the-lines lifelong Republican prosecutor appointed by Ronald Reagan.

The politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.

Dowd’s gratuitous swipe at the bizarre adoration the progressives have for Kamala Harris, a woman of color, meaning she must be woke because that’s what the religion dictates, aside, her point about “natural allies” is the rub.

For most of her career in politics, Nancy Pelosi has been pretty far left of center, to the point where she was considered quite radical in the scheme of liberalism. But she’s still a liberal, by which I mean she’s not a progressive. In these particular times, that makes her conservative, an enemy of the proletariat, one cute pump away from literally Hitler.

But Democrats are making that dream ever more distant because they are using their time knifing one another and those who want to be on their side instead of playing it smart.

Liberals and progressive share many things: the dream of equality and the hatred of that pus-filled boil that sits in the Oval Office. What they do not share, however, is what “equality” means anymore, or what is pragmatically viable to pop the pimple.

The argument about whether Trump is impeachable is the wrong argument. Mueller settled that. We know Trump did things worthy of impeachment. That is not the question we should be asking. The question is: Should he be impeached?

The progressive Puritans think we must honor the Constitution and go for it because it’s the right thing to do.

Whether it’s the “right thing to do” as a matter of principle isn’t quite so clear. Impeachment is a political act, and as despicable as Trump is as a person and president, the nuclear option of impeachment is a double-edged sword. It’s not (as the left keeps believing because what else could it possibly be?) that people don’t know that he’s awful, but that half a country believes his awfulness is better than the alternative.

We are a bougie nation, and bougie has worked well for many of us and, even for those who have yet to rise from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, they still hope and expect to. They want cute pumps and chocolate too. Immigrants don’t come here for a future of welfare and food stamps, but to start businesses, have their children educated and achieve success that they could not find elsewhere. They want their own pair of pumps.

The attempt to impeach Trump is one of the rare cases in which something obviously justified is obviously stupid.

Even if the House voted articles of impeachment, the Senate won’t convict and remove. That’s the pragmatic back end, the thing which, according to Dowd and Pelosi, makes impeachment a stupid option. But there’s serious doubt that the Democrat-majority House could muster the votes to pass articles of impeachment.

It’s not that Trump hasn’t earned it (mind you, it’s an accusation, not a conviction, of an impeachable offense), but that the Democrats in the House of Representatives are still mostly liberals. They aren’t really fans of progressive ideology, and don’t really want to hand over the keys to their BMWs to AOC for redistribution to undocumented immigrants.

Poor Nancy Pelosi. Poor Maureen Dowd. They hoped to raise everyone to their rightful place in the bourgeoisie, and here they are for their efforts, hated for their cute pumps. If not for the pumps, what is the point of putting in the effort all these years to make the nation more equal? Is the point to allow everyone, no matter how humble their beginnings, to live like aristocrats or to make everyone, no matter how hard they strive, live like the proletariat?