Mired in the recurrent nightmare that is Donald Trump, it is hard to look back and take stock of what happened last week, let alone three months ago. Yet in looking back at Hillary Clinton’s defeat, one can not only see the rising tide of Trump, but also the tragic fate of American liberalism. Nowhere is this clearer than in the contradictions of Clinton’s deeply personal but nonetheless strained relationship to feminism.

Clinton’s feminism was intensely individual: one could never stop hearing a silent “it’s my turn” in every public speech. Deeply neoliberal, her feminism was hopelessly attached to a political world that recedes ever more into the past: the America of Ronald Reagan and the New Democrats.

All political environments develop and change over time, making positions like corporate feminism entirely capable of mass success at one moment, while deeply alienating at others. Clinton’s corporate feminism grew out of the Democratic Party’s struggle to reform itself into a winning coalition after the collective disaster of Reagan. This variant of feminism didn’t so much fail to achieve broad support as succeed in its aim as a rearguard action at a time when capitalist enterprise was increasing its pull on an already failing Democratic Party. As the feminism of the party became increasingly hollowed out by their corporate sponsors, it increasingly relied on the faces and language of former struggles, while offering far less to both oppressed people of color and the alienated “white working class.”