Republican Roy Moore’s stunning defeat in Alabama marked a watershed moment for the national movement around the issue of sexual abuse.The allegations that Moore had made sexual advances on girls as young as 14 decades ago, when he was in his 30s, had created a real contest out of what should have been an easy victory for any Republican candidate in ruby-red Alabama.“Women really do seem to be wanting to make their collective voices heard on this issue, and they don’t want to see it swept under the rug one more time,” said Jessica Leeds, one of those who stepped forward last year to accuse Donald Trump, then the GOP presidential nominee, of having committed sexual misconduct.Read more: What happened in Alabama? As Democrat Doug Jones pulls out win, Republicans left to bicker in Roy Moore aftermathDemocrat Doug Jones wins stunning upset in Alabama as Roy Moore refuses to concedeWhy Black voters rejected Roy Moore: ‘We knew the world was looking at us’With Trump’s election, that kind of reckoning seemed to have been pushed backward.But the sense of grievance remained, and gained force this fall with the toppling of movie producer Harvey Weinstein and the once-revered figures in media and politics who have been taken down in his wake.Democrat Doug Jones’ unlikely victory may also be a sign that the formula for winning in a deeply polarized political climate, perfected by Trump, may not be so reliable as it seemed.“I think the politics may be at a real turning point,” said Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author known best for his trilogy of volumes about the civil rights era. “Anti-government, obstructionist politics are being reduced to having to be explicitly backward and tribal. That works for Trump, but I just don’t think that it’s going to keep working.”As the #MeToo movement takes hold and matures, it is moving beyond the stage of rooting out individual bad actors to &# ...
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