This embrace of the gender card by Clinton and her cronies, this move from thinking with their heads to voting with their vaginas, is being celebrated as a great leap forward. It’s nothing of the sort. It merely confirms the speedy and terrifying shrinking of the political sphere in recent years, with the abstract being elbowed aside by the emotional, and the old focus on ideas and values now playing a very quiet second fiddle to an obsession with identity.

The celebration of a potential president on the basis of her natural characteristics shows that the growing vacuum where big and serious ideas ought to be is being filled with biologism, with a view of people as little more than bundles of genes, accidents of birth, colors, sexes, genders. The rotten thing that human beings struggled against for generations—the tendency to judge individuals by their biology rather than their talents and beliefs—has made a comeback under the banner of identity politics.

In 2001, The Onion did one of its brilliant “American Voices” polls on the question of Hillary standing for the presidency in 2004. One of the respondents, the white guy in the suit, says: “A woman president? What if she menstruates all over some important legislation?”

So as recently as 2001, talking about Hillary as someone who menstruates was recognised to be a sexist throwback to that old, dark era when women were treated as animalistic, and not as capable of abstract reasoning as men; today, the fact that Hillary “knows what it’s like to menstruate” is presented as a serious reason to vote for her. Meet the vagina voters, the new sexists, reducing women to bits of flesh as thoroughly as those hoary old misogynists were doing a hundred years ago.