Does the movement behind Bernie Sanders foreshadow a reincarnation of the New Deal? For many, the answer to this question would seem to be a clear yes. History doesn’t repeat itself, however, and the better answer is no.

Spokespeople for Bernie’s campaign, including the candidate himself, make frequent references to the New Deal. Its landmark accomplishments in social welfare, labor rights, public works, and industrial and financial regulation echo through Sanders’s campaign literature and stump speeches. Indeed, a key plank in the Sanders platform, the Green New Deal, memorializes that epoch of deep structural reform.

For many, restoring some version of the New Deal is the defining task of the moment, the far horizon of the possible. Images of the “forgotten man” and a third of a nation “ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed” travel well from the United States of the Great Depression to depictions of America after the Great Recession. Likewise, Sanders speaks of the homeless, of the immigrant poor and persecuted, of exploited workers, of the medically deprived and destitute.