Warren and Sanders didn’t describe America the way Donald Trump does: As a country that was nearly perfect under Ronald Reagan or Beaver Cleaver and has been eroding ever since. In a party filled with African Americans, feminists, and lesbians and gays, you can’t do that. But their descriptions were bleak nonetheless, and they illustrated the fundamental divide inside today’s Democratic Party: between Democrats who believe America turned a corner under Barack Obama and Democrats who believe it got worse.

It’s no surprise that Clinton, who falls into camp number one, overwhelmingly won the African American vote. African Americans, like Latinos, are far more optimistic about America’s future than are whites. And it’s no surprise that Bernie Sanders’s supporters are mostly white. They appreciate the election of a black president, but it’s not central to their understanding of this moment in American history. Oligarchy is.
This is why the divide in today’s Democratic Party is deeper than it was when Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton. Back then, before the financial crisis, the Democratic Party didn’t have a revolutionary wing. Now it does. Back then, the party’s young idealists were rebelling against George W. Bush and the establishment Democrats too timid to confront him. Today, they’re rebelling against America’s economic and political system itself.

Hillary Clinton has no choice but to run as the candidate of continuity. Barack Obama is popular among Democrats. She worked for him. And she’s an institutionalist, not an insurrectionist, at her core.