There’s a lot of people wagging their fingers just now at the 1990s. If you want to understand the 2010s and HarveyFrankengate, they say, it all started with Bill Clinton’s One Free Grope.

How do we solve the problem? Let’s do an Ike and make the problem bigger, with Hillary Clinton.

I haven’t read Hillary Clinton’s majestic political thriller What Happened, but I understand that page 114 contains the following gem:

This has to be said: sexism and misogyny played a role in the 2016 presidential election. Exhibit A is that the flagrantly sexist candidate won.

How could this be, 50 years after the Civil Rights Acts, in a half century where the only thing that liberals cared about was racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Now we know. It turns out that the supporters of Hillary Clinton, in Hollywood, in Congress, in broadcasting, are the most sexist and misogynistic people on the planet! So that’s what she means by “sexism and misogyny played a role!” Who knew!

Sexism and misogyny are what Harvey Weinstein does. And Al Franken. And Charlie Rose too. Because in my book, sexism is getting a girl into a restaurant for champagne and caviar, hustling her out a side door over to the office, and misogyny is bringing her back “much the worse for wear.” Or thrusting your tongue into her mouth. Or parading around naked. Talk about the power of the patriarchy, feminist approved, because “choice.”

But this is very bad. If the liberal champions of the rights of women are nothing but gap-toothed sexists and misogynists then what hope is there for a world in which women are safe and respected?

It gets worse. If women are being harassed six ways from Sunday in the workplace, maybe that means that women are too fragile and helpless to look after themselves without the protection of fathers and brothers and husbands near at hand, especially considering that the police are too busy killing blacks to lend a hand.

It is clear from the actions of the Harveys and the Als and the Charlies that their thing is power. They like power and they like to use it on women. But if this is a problem with liberal notables, imagine how bad the problem must be for poor Julia, faithfully living her Life of Julia consuming government programs. She’s the kind of girl that works in an administrative bureaucracy like a hospital, or a congressional office, or a corporation, in which workers do the will of the organization supervised by administrative power from above. This means that any woman is at risk from any man supervising her. Because power.

The message from the campus rape crisis and sexual harassment in the workplace is that women expect, nay demand, to be protected. And they get very angry if they are not protected, like this snowflake at The New Republic who says that the snowflakers were right all along: it isn’t safe! Therefore:

Really making our spaces safe will require much more, though. It will require a real redistribution of power throughout the workplace, the campus, the economy, the world. Until then, the blathering class is right on one point: There is no such thing as a safe space.

Notice the passive voice. To Sarah Jaffe, “redistribution of power” is something that just gets done, no doubt by government’s men with guns, properly supervised by diversity and inclusion administrators.

So here we are, with the wages of a century of liberals redistributing power and loot:

• The sexual revolution has made college women into booty calls.
• Careers for women has meant subordinating them to the slavering Harveys of the world.
• Blacks are so pissed off that they believe that the cops are trying to kill them.

And the liberal response is to demand more “redistribution of power.”

You know, if Sarah Jaffe got out more she might discover that there is a whole universe of thinkers out there dedicated to the proposition that the problem is power, and the solution is the separation of powers. To these thinkers, the redistribution of power means nothing, just the replacement of one set of thugs by another. But if you separate power, within government and between government and the private sector and religion, then you can set up the bleachers to watch the powerful duke it out with each other. And while the powerful are doing their power thing with each other the rest of us can create safe spaces where people that are not that interested in power can wive and thrive without kowtowing every morning to the local power yokel.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.