Dahlia Lithwick writes:

The photos were all over the internet on election night of 2016. They went viral in the bad way, and they all looked something like this: Women, standing in a crowd of other women, hands over their mouths, tears on their cheeks, as they realized that Hillary Clinton had lost to Donald Trump, the man who bragged about treating women like garbage. Those photos had come immediately on the heels of the other photos, also inescapable, taken earlier that day: Women posed outside of public schools, and churches, and rec centers, wearing pantsuits and beaming into the camera with elated looks that said, I just voted for the first woman to be president of the United States! That whiplash? That immense distance between the two sets of photos, between the historic, thrilling high of the morning and the gut punch of the night that followed? It’s a feeling millions of women have been processing ever since.

In all the soul searching that came in the months after November 2016, it didn’t take long for that feeling to turn into a question: Would it be insane to run a woman—any woman—against Donald Trump in 2020? As my friend Michelle Goldberg put it six months after Trump had won, “many American women want to break the male lock on the presidency, but they also want to save the republic, and it’s all too possible that those two goals are at odds.” We had all just witnessed a highly qualified woman lose the presidency to a carnival barker. Why, with the stakes growing ever higher, would we even consider trying it again?

Which brings me to Elizabeth Warren and the women who love her.

Warren seems to be surging in the polls this month. It is certainly true that a lot of men are proving to be stalwart fans and a lot of women are lining up behind other candidates, for once having the option to pick between other women running for president, including Kamala Harris, who is neck and neck with Warren in several polls. But a few months ago I started to notice a boomlet of sorts, women who were willing to fall in love with Warren, just as they had with Clinton, and women who feel that Warren alone can redeem the insult Clinton sustained. To be clear, Elizabeth Warren is not Hillary Clinton. Comparing them distorts and diminishes their unique accomplishments and formidable skills. And yet: Even taking into account the late-breaking Comey effect and the years of Clinton family baggage, it has always been utterly obvious that part of Clinton’s loss was due to misogyny—a misogyny that, if anything, has only become more apparent in the years since. [Continue reading…]