It is one thing to lose an election to the most talented politician of his generation, a man with such a gift for rhetoric and such a compelling life story, that people were predicting he would be the first African American president of the United States back when he was a mere state senator in Illinois. It is quite another to lose to the most odious presidential candidate in memory, a reality television star with an impossible haircut who made no secret of his hostility toward Latinos, blacks, Muslims, and, above all, women. Hillary Clinton has now done both, and it’s the latter loss that no doubt hurts the most. For the first female presidential candidate in American history to be defeated by a man not even one-tenth as qualified as she is, and who seemingly takes sadistic pleasure in demeaning women to boot, is almost too sickening for words.

It also raises an inevitable question: How could Clinton have lost? Was she a uniquely terrible candidate, or were broader forces aligned against her?

In the days since her shocking defeat, Clinton and the Democratic establishment she represents have been buried in an avalanche of angry criticism. And much of it is deserved. She was the wrong candidate to run in an election defined by a swell of anti-establishment populism. She was nearly as odious to the American people as Trump herself, according to the polls; in fact, Trump was the only presidential candidate in modern history who was more disliked by voters. She bungled every controversy, real and imagined, apologizing only grudgingly when she was wrong (the private email server) and refusing to take seriously accusations of cronyism (the Clinton Foundation) even if they were overblown. It is no wonder that some are saying Bernie Sanders—a populist good-government crusader—would have fared better than Clinton against Trump.

These criticisms often fail to acknowledge the millions of people Clinton did inspire, particularly the women who believed they were on the verge of electing the country’s first female president. (She did, after all, win the popular vote.) They also fail to recognize that Sanders’s class-based approach to addressing our economic ills didn’t resonate with many minority voters in the Democratic primary, alienating a core element of the party’s base. But most glaringly of all, these criticisms reduce the election to the failings of one person, boiling it down to her inability to appeal to a clutch of disillusioned white working class voters in what used to be a Democratic firewall in the Rust Belt.

The enraged focus on Clinton ignores the broader historical forces at work. This was clearly a change election, a wave that was bound to dispel pretty much any Democratic candidate in its path. For the first time in decades, stalwart Democratic states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania went to the Republicans. It is all the more remarkable given that, unlike the last change election in 2008, we live in a time of relative peace and prosperity. The inequalities embedded in our economic system are undeniable. The U.S. continues to have a military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and has abetted wars in Yemen and elsewhere. But in the past eight years under President Barack Obama, the U.S. has made steady progress toward full employment and has vastly reduced its military commitments abroad, which in the Bush era resulted in thousands of American deaths, hundreds of thousands of injuries, and untold psychological damage to military veterans. In the simplest sense, one candidate in 2016 promised to uphold that progress; the victor promised to reverse it.