The foreclosure crisis, the one Bloomberg falsely blamed on the end of the racially discriminatory practice of redlining? Warren talked about the human cost: “When Mayor Bloomberg was busy blaming African Americans and Latinos for the housing crash of 2008, I was right here in Las Vegas ... holding hearings on the banks that were taking away homes from millions of families,” she reminded the audience.

Her ultra-millionaire tax, and fewer breaks for the wealthy overall? “Do we want to invest in Mr. Bloomberg?” Warren asked. “Or do we want to invest in an entire generation of young students?”

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She also schooled the other candidates, telling Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) he was responsible for the behavior of his supporters on Twitter and cooling down the increasingly nasty contretemps between former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). “This is not right,” she told Buttigieg.

This is not right. Those are words for the Trump era. The children separated from their parents at the border, the grotesque personal corruption of Trump, the financial cruelties inflicted on those in need — none of those are right.

Warren being the one to say so shows what else we might have gotten wrong.

One of the lessons Democrats took away from Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 was that it was still impossible to get a woman elected president. We are, the thinking goes, still too sexist, still too backward. The double standard is simply too much for any woman, no matter how qualified, to overcome.

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But Warren emerged as the victor of Wednesday’s debate, in part by taking full advantage of the particular type of moral authority we permit women — especially women of a certain age — to show in our society, She took that force and turned it on Bloomberg — an obvious stand-in for Trump — with devastating effectiveness. Yes, it’s anger, but it’s something more than that.

As women age, they are taken less seriously. They are more likely to get passed over, and if they get angry, they are dismissed as scolds. There is, however, one role that older women are encouraged to assume in our society: that of moral arbiter, the person who decides what is right and what is wrong. In the Victorian era, older women weren’t simply chaperones. As Gail Collins reported in her book “No Stopping Us Now,” they were social and political activists, the ones who set a new standard for society.

More recently, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the idea emerged that we needed women to fix the mess that the men with too much greed and ego had made. “After the crash, Iceland’s women lead the rescue,” the Guardian enthused in one instance.

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Warren, of course, made her reputation in the run-up to the crisis and afterward. She took on elite impunity with a unique force. Warren famously said she would leave “blood and teeth” on the floor in the struggle to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and after getting elected to Congress took on a rogues’ gallery of banking miscreants. She told Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, “You should be fired” — and within less than two weeks, he left his post.

I’m not saying that I believe women are somehow better or purer of heart than men; that idea can be disproved by anything ranging from my memories of seventh grade to the actions of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. Nor am I claiming that women are the only people capable of channeling this kind of moral authority; it was just this month that we saw Mitt Romney excoriate Trump as he voted for impeachment. Sanders also uses his age and unshakable beliefs to challenge both the Democratic Party and Trump.

But it is also true that middle-aged and older women have powered the opposition to Trump, from the first Women’s March onward. They are standing up and doing what is right, taking on the power centers in both parties to effect change. They are angered by his violations of political and social norms. That was the Elizabeth Warren on the debate stage Wednesday night — claiming the mantle of moral authority, using her wisdom and knowledge to set a new standard.

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Maybe we have gotten this electability concept all wrong. Maybe the person most likely to take out Trump is a woman, fueled by a bone-deep knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. Maybe Warren is more likely to win than anyone thinks.