Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the 2024 election should prompt a reckoning on the left. Everything progressives proposed deserves to be scrutinized—their economic agenda, foreign policy failures, and the racial animosity painstakingly nurtured since the Obama presidency. Another ideology long overdue for a thorough inventory is feminism.

It’s not just that Democrats misjudged what was important to American women. Following the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision that sent the abortion issue back to states, the left promised that women would roar, flooding the polls to elect abortion-friendly politicians. Perhaps something like that happened in the midterm elections following the decision, but the 2024 contests revealed different priorities. According to one NBC exit poll, not only did the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris lose support among the female voters compared to Joe Biden, but just 14 percent of her voters considered pregnancy terminations a key issue. White suburban women, with the rising cost of living on their minds, actually broke for Trump.

Feminism’s promise was not just to be a movement dedicated to accomplishing tangible political goals, such as women’s suffrage, social change, abortion, or employment perks. Over the course of the 20^th century, feminism became a lifestyle movement: It required shape their lives to fit the ideology. A feminist was to jettison restrictive undergarments and embrace a career. The movement’s crowning achievement was supposed to be a powerful female leader—culminating, one day, in a United States president.

Kamala Harris, following in the footsteps of Hillary Clinton before her, was hoping to become that female leader. Harris, at least, succeeded where Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin had failed—she actually became the first female vice president after her own presidential candidacy failed to take off. As veep, she was an add-on to Joe Biden, the old Obama VP, who ran a bizarre social distancing campaign in a midst of COVID closures.

The narrative that the American electorate is not ready for a woman president is just wrong. In 2008, most of the people who are now Trump voters were energized by the selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. The McCain-Palin duo was comfortably entering the final stretch of the campaign when the subprime bubble burst, propelling Barack Obama into office. So it’s not that Americans won’t vote for a woman, but that something was terribly wrong with the Harris candidacy.

Since the 1960s second wave, feminists insisted that external forces shaping the lives of young women barred them from realizing their full potential. For instance, Killing Us Softly, the documentary by Jean Kilbourne released in 1979, blamed the advertising industry for perpetuating negative stereotypes that women and girls then internalized. Feminist media prescribed proper behavior for breaking those stereotypes. Betty Friedan’s now-tattered 1963 classic The Feminine Mystique urged women to enter the public sphere while lying about the housewives being driven insane by suburban monotony. First released in 1970, the compilation Our Bodies, Ourselves gave advice about how to be aggressive in personal sexual matters.

Because the personal became political, no detail of private life evaded the feminists’ scrutiny. Parents and teachers were offered recommendations about how to raise American children, from choosing bedtime stories to how to dress them. The classic Disney approach to storytelling was dispensed with, together with frilly pink dresses, because of feminist fear that it would produce women who were too submissive. Girls were tirelessly encouraged to get into prestigious professions that, traditionally, had been dominated by men. Likewise, boys were encouraged to absorb received feminist wisdom.

Harris was born a year after Friedan published her groundbreaking volume. She was raised in left-wing academic circles, the epicenter of feminist lifestyle machinations—the kind of environment expected to produce powerful women, proud leaders of tomorrow.

As a candidate, Harris dressed the part—in pant suits, of course—but apart from that she was a disappointment to her hopeful supporters. As her campaign failed to gain momentum, Harris burned through $1.5 billion in 15 weeks, affirming negative stereotype of conspicuous female consumption. Watching it all unfold, I kept wondering what brought this tongue-tied woman into politics in the first place.

Her word-salad interviews were painful to watch. She failed every single one of them, including the question about what she is like as a person. If she doesn’t know who she is, who does? And how could anyone be expected to believe she can lead?

Harris is intensely private, the media insisted, which is why we know so little about her as a person. Fair enough, but why would such a private person seek out a life in the public eye? She’s not a wonk either—a quality that presupposes a certain degree of aloofness in a political figure. I suspect she was told early on that smart women get involved in politics, and, being insecure about her intellectual abilities, she set out to prove herself.

Following an affair with then-Speaker of California Assembly, Willie Brown, Harris launched her career in San Francisco politics in the 1990s and rode the elevator until it brought her a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. She is the quintessential overpromoted DEI pick—and she didn’t so much as even want that position. A photo circulating on social media a few days after her stunning loss showed her beaming and relaxed, playing Connect Four with two girls and sipping wine.

Contrast her to the feminist politicians of previous generation, like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein. Like Harris, Pelosi and Feinstein started their political trajectories in San Francisco and ended up in D.C. Like Harris, the two were considered ethnic minorities when they were starting out—Italian and Jewish respectively.

Both were good-looking in their youth—Feinstein was the daughter of a beauty queen. Their ambitions, unlike Harris’s, were initially tempered by the realities of family life—Pelosi is a mother of five, for instance. Both had doting, supportive husbands, while Harris floated from one unfortunate relationship to another. Most importantly, both were smart and driven and succeeded despite the obstacles that life threw at them.

Feinstein, for instance, entered politics in the 1960s and 70s, when domestic terrorists besieged the San Francisco establishment. San Francisco historian David Talbot wrote in Season of The Witch that the New World Liberation Front “planted a bomb on a windowsill of her Pacific Heights home immediately underneath her daughter’s bedroom.” The bomb misfired. But another radical group fired on the windows of her vacation home.

As president of the board of supervisors at the time of the 1978 assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Mascone, Feinstein was sworn in as mayor. She became the kind of micromanaging, tough leader the city pined for in those chaotic days. Later, she was sent to D.C., where she earned a reputation as  a tough, learned senator who worked tirelessly on behalf of her party and the causes she believed in.

Talbot explains that in her San Francisco days, Feinstein had to contend with a good amount of sexism, including the sort that most often comes from the left. Politically ascendant libertines found her too prim and proper, her politics too moderate. The drag queens ridiculed her mercilessly.

Nancy Pelosi, similar to Feinstein, didn’t have an easy time of it. She famously ruled the United States House of Representatives with an iron fist. She projects authority with relish—think of her notorious walk with the gravel past a Tea Party demonstration following the 2009 passage of the Obamacare. Once Democrats lost control of the House, Pelosi began describing herself as Speaker Emerita—a conspicuous gesture of self-aggrandizement.

One doesn’t have to like the politics of either of these two women or to accept their proclivity toward corruption to spot the obvious differences in competence between them and Harris.  There is no doubt that Feinstein and Pelosi were natural-born politicians and that they made the most of their abilities. You couldn’t pry power out of their dying hands—Feinstein remained a United States senator up until her death at the age of 90, past the point at which her daughter had power of attorney over her. And the 84-year-old Pelosi recently filed papers to run for the House in 2026.

Women like that are like men and then some. And, of course, the idea that men had success handed to them on a silver platter is a DEI lie, and reaction against that lie is the prime reason why Trump won the male vote handily. Not only do men work their butts off in order to succeed in most industries, they very seldom get to be who they are through pampering. Even the most privileged boys suffer through sadistic hazing rituals to gain passage to adulthood.

World-historic figures often have unhappy childhoods—unfortunate circumstances build character. It’s a rather common story, look, for instance, at Vice President-elect J. D. Vance, who was born into poverty and abandoned by his parents. He served his country in Iraq and went to a state school before getting admitted into Yale Law, publishing a bestseller and launching a successful venture capital career. In his 40 short years, he will have become the second most powerful man in the world.

Harris’s failure suggests that they don’t make feminists like they used to. The woman who spent years watching Joe Biden spiral into dementia and didn’t invoke the 25^th Amendment never really wanted the presidency. She is not a political animal, not a leader. She is no match to the previous generation that had to transcend their circumstances and prove themselves as women.

The question for the feminist mainstream is what are they telling American women to lean in for? Women socialized within feminist lifestyle prescriptions are falling short.