When HRC was the presidential candidate, criticism of her — even when it was grounded in factual analyses of her work as first lady, Senator, and Secretary of State — sometimes faced intense pushback that it was ‘really’ crypto-misogyny. And it’s absolutely, horrifyingly true that opposition to her did involve a warlocks’ brew of misogyny. Electoral results aside, she deserves abiding credit for the (literally, alas) titanic role she played in the surge of women who’ve entered politics — as an example, inspiration, as an object lesson, and not least as a battering ram that broke many of the sexist defaults of so much political machinery. But here’s the thing: the sensational rise of AOC, the steady success of Warren, and the spiking popularity of Harris, and the recognition of many others — Stacey Abrams, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, among many others — all of this casts serious doubt on the claim that opposition to HRC was, at bottom, misogyny. As I said, a lot of it was. But accusations of misogyny were also weaponized, as they say these days, to neutralize legitimate criticism of HRC’s politics and of the regressive role she’s played over decades in reducing the Democratic Party to a GOP ‘lite.’ If opposition to HRC was really just deep-seated, irreducible misogyny, then the success and esteem for all these women now should be inexplicable. It isn’t, of course. So what’s the difference? Well, many of these women represent a decisive break from the Clintonite version of the Democratic Party. So maybe, just maybe misogyny wasn’t quite as decisive or pervasive as many pro-HRC voices argued. If so, the implications are serious: put bluntly, a lot of feminist energy was turned away from the broader challenge of social change, and put to work preserving the status quo by the conservative ‘centrist’ Democratic machine. It’s not an either/or, and these issues are nebulous and overlapping. But HRC’s defeat remains stubbornly unresolved, blamed more on Russian interference than on the plain fact that HRC embodied the Democratic Party’s past.