Single women are a crucial element of the Democrat constituency, pushed to the polls with a crude combination of scare tactics and pandering that would be comical if it wasn’t so effective in election after election.

We may pause to remark that Republicans should have been much more prepared for this in 2016, but we should also look back to 2012 because it was used in 2012, regardless of how absurd it was to suggest Mitt Romney was leading a “War on Women.”

Even some liberals are recognizing the absurdity, given the emergence of “Strange New Respect” for Romney this year. Of course this new respect is pure political opportunism — and don’t be surprised to hear liberals complaining in future election that the conservative Republican presidential candidate isn’t as candid and relaxed about social issues as Donald Trump was in the good old days of 2016.

We should practice a little political opportunism of our own, and put the Left’s revised opinion of Romney to good use. What they said about him was absurd in almost every respect. They’ve wholeheartedly embraced his position on the geopolitical threat of Russia, which means they’re tacitly admitting Barack Obama didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. They razz Trump about not paying enough taxes, but they didn’t care a whit that Romney paid stupendous amounts of tax, plus vast charitable contributions.

Most pertinently, they turned Mitt Romney into a misogynist clod, and his wife Ann Romney into an out-of-touch Stepford Wife, on the thinnest of pretexts. Lefty polemicists today are acting like they were possessed by political demons when they spent the final weeks of the 2012 campaign shrieking about “binders full of women,” and now they can’t quite remember what they were going on about.

As for Mrs. Romney, she was unceremoniously stripped of her feminine identity by liberals and treated like a space alien because she dared to endorse stay-at-home motherhood. When a mild backlash ensued, the White House memorably denied one of its slander ninja by claiming to know several different people with the same name.

In the Democrat imagination and campaign ads, Republicans are constantly targeting American woman. You can draw a straight line from Anita Hill’s hit on Clarence Thomas in the Nineties, to “journalist” George Stephanopoulos ambushing the Republican presidential field with a bizarre question about contraceptives in the 2012 primary.

It’s all pure opportunism, not principle. Romney was a choirboy, so they claimed his policies revealed his secret inner misogynist beast. Trump’s policies include a family-leave plan, a culture-war cease-fire declared by Peter Thiel at the GOP convention, and an unease with late-term abortion that tracks with the majority of the country. There’s precious little that could be twisted into a War on Women narrative, even by the people who used Sandra Fluke to portray spending ten bucks on contraceptives as the equivalent of female slavery. Therefore, the Left ignores Trump’s policies and hits his character, while Bill Freakin’ Clinton gets ready to move back into the White House.

In the Nineties, Democrats argued that Clinton’s sexual abuses had nothing to do with how he governed, so discussing them was a silly distraction we all needed to MoveOn.org from, even when he was in the dock for perjury. Liberals of that election cycle laughed out loud at the notion Bill Clinton’s libido had any effect whatsoever on national policy. He was good for the abortion industry, so his treatment of actual women was irrelevant.

Partisan feminism is at a strange crossroads, as the core feminist message of independence clashes with victim politics. Women are supposed to simultaneously feel strong, capable… and be utterly helpless before systemic male chauvinism. They can only achieve personal “independence” through total dependence on the Big Government, which is staffed and managed by the only men in America who supposedly aren’t looking to exploit them. (You’re not to think about the bureaucrats who keep getting caught surfing for pornography on government computers.)

The great left-wing project to rewire society in defiance of biology has saddled America with devastating social problems, but that’s not a problem for the social engineers. Indeed, it’s more of a feature than a bug.

Everything from illegitimacy, to crime, to the enormous difficulty of raising children as a single mom becomes another opportunity for them to push increased government power on a fearful, atomized population, which is rapidly losing its ability to form non-government voluntary structures of enduring social value, such as thriving small businesses and stable marriages.

The dirty little secret known to the Left all along, but denied vociferously by them until their plans were fully up and running, is that most of these societal changes hit women harder, due to everything from their voluntary career choices, to the realities of child-rearing.

So in the world liberals have made, single women become more anxious than ever, about everything from campus rape to the “implicit bias” of a systematically misogynist workplace, and they rush to government for protection from the harms caused by that abusive government.