If you are a Republican running for political office, it’s a safe bet that you seek to identify with conservatives’ last great president, Ronald Reagan. Increasingly, the Democrats’ alternative is not so much a person, since he has faded from memory, but a program: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s. With their poor understanding of American history, young people fail to realize that what they really want is a new New Deal, and what candidates such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are prepared to offer them is best understood as a further expansion of the original New Deal.

In a speech on socialism and the economy in June, Bernie Sanders said, “Today … we must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion.” New front-runner Elizabeth Warren also admires the New Deal, and opinion writer Noah Smith called her “the closest thing modern American politics has to a successor to FDR.” When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced her sweeping new environmental proposals, she labeled them a “Green New Deal.”