Ever since Bill de Blasio coasted to the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York, political taxonomists have fixated on a new left-wing ideology: “deBlasioWarren populism,” a kind of Germanic rhetorical synthesis of the mayor and the Massachusetts senator. Critics and boosters alike have crowned the two pols leaders of the same movement, albeit with centrists warning that it represents an electoral “dead end” and liberals cheering the clarifying virtues of the new “progressive populism.”

As it happens, though, de Blasio and Warren stand for two distinct, if overlapping, worldviews. And one is likely to be far more successful at a time of near-record distrust of government.

Start with de Blasio, who famously made social and economic inequality the centerpiece of his campaign—anyone who follows politics can recite his “tale of two cities” indictment of the Bloomberg era. De Blasio assailed the privileges of the wealthy (“If you live on Park Avenue, you got everything you need. Nannies and housekeepers…” began one de Blasio ad. He championed affordable housing, and promised a local minimum wage and more sick leave for workers. His signature initiative would raise taxes on New Yorkers making over $500,000 to fund universal pre-kindergarten and after-school programs.

Warren spends much less time fulminating against the rich per se. Though she has an interest in inequality, she talks far more about the middle-class than the poor. Her signal preoccupation is the way financial institutions have amassed enormous economic and political advantages at the expense of everyone else. She has co-sponsored a bill that would break up the megabanks. She has labored to expose why it is that federal regulators never take big banks to court. She decries the way reform battles in Congress pit a few dozen activists against thousands of industry lobbyists, an asymmetry that virtually guarantees victory for the status quo.

De Blasio’s rhetoric sounds more leftist, implying a relentless competition between underclass and overclass. But the substance of Warren’s agenda is far more radical. She wants to upend a fundamentally corrupt system, one in which big banks and other interests have coopted the apparatus of government. By contrast, de Blasio implicitly accepts “the system”—which in New York means an economy built around the financial sector and the real estate industry—and wants to mitigate its least desirable effects.