Before the smoke had cleared after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Americans were already asking, “Why do they hate us?” The question felt useless, even whiny. It was also unanswerable, since “our” specific attackers were dead. Yet it persisted. It persisted because of a sense that even with those particular haters gone, the hate itself was lethal, and whoever “they” had been, there was plenty more in store for “us.” Some people speculated guiltily, from the left, about how we might have prompted the hatred with our imperialism. Many more speculated indignantly, buoyed by belligerent patriotism. The question didn’t get us anywhere. In fact, it cemented our national paranoia and sense of victimhood, always a reactionary consciousness. Nevertheless, since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, feminists have been asking, on behalf of women, the same thing about men: Why do “they” hate “us”?

In Kate Manne’s 2018 study of misogyny, Down Girl, the philosopher identifies pervasive hatred of women as a central problem facing society. Manne extensively discusses Elliot Rodger, the angry young incel who, in 2014, killed six people and injured 14 others in a shooting near Santa Barbara, an act that he explained as the result of his rage at having been sexually rejected throughout his life. Manne’s book ends with Hillary Clinton’s defeat and Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, events Manne insists were also fueled by hatred of women. This view has suffused the liberal feminist mainstream. Right after Trump’s election, Salon published an essay by Amanda Marcotte calling Clinton’s loss a “Misogyny Apocalypse,” blaming white men “consumed with resentment at being expected to treat women and racial minorities as equals.” When #MeToo fervor began a year later, Rebecca Solnit voiced assumptions common to her milieu. Of Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Bill O’Reilly, even mass killers, she wrote, they “are the norms, not the aberrations. This is a society still permeated and shaped and limited by misogyny, among other afflictions.” Jill Filipovic has blamed misogyny not only for Trump’s presidency but also for phenomena as disparate as anti-abortion politics and the far left’s preference for Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren.

No doubt some men do hate women. Yet it’s odd to read the 2016 election as a victory for misogyny. Before Hillary Clinton was defeated in the general election, she first won the nomination of her party, beating a vigorous opponent who had passionate supporters at the grass roots. Though she was favored by the party establishment, sometimes unfairly, she also won the nomination the way a person is supposed to, by getting more votes in more primaries. In the general election, she won the popular vote by almost three million. There couldn’t be more conclusive proof that more Americans wanted her to be president than wanted Donald Trump.

The outcome of the election was less a display of woman-hating than a symptom of a serious structural problem. The electoral college, an institution intended to preserve slave owners’ power and property, still upholds white supremacy by disproportionately representing sparsely populated rural white states such as Wyoming and Idaho, places where conservatism reigns and solidarity among citizens is perhaps undermined by living too far from their neighbors. Hatred of Hillary Clinton could indeed have an ugly, misogynist tinge, as when MAGA hat wearers chanted “Lock her up” at Trump rallies. But it’s dubious to insist that misogyny was the decisive factor in shaping voting patterns when the candidate who won the popular vote—a far better measure of how people feel than the number of electors—was a woman.

Nonetheless, today’s liberal feminists remain passionately invested in the idea of misogyny’s pervasiveness, a conviction that often leads them to fixate with special laser force on progressive men. If misogyny is everywhere, it is not enough to see it in Roy Moore, an extremist Christian fundamentalist who had to be banned from the local mall for creeping on teenage girls. One must zero in, with equal fervor, on the anonymous Bernie bro on the internet who disliked Hillary Clinton a bit too much, and the sexual proclivities of any liberal man deemed to have institutional power, whether in Hollywood, Congress, or the art world.