Ocasio-Cortez does not. She depicts American history less as an arc of progress than as a circle, in which America repeats—rather than rises above—its past. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE’s) treatment of people of color, she told The Intercept, continues an American tradition: “The very first immigration policy law passed in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1800s, and so the very bedrock of U.S. immigration policy, the very beginning of it was a policy based on racial exclusion.” She told New York magazine that, “child separation is a barbaric new iteration of what is going on, but for a very long time.”

Some of this difference can be explained by context. It’s easier to stress the continuities between America’s racist past and present when you’re running for Congress in a bright blue, fifty percent Latino district, than when you’re running for president. But Ocasio-Cortez isn’t unique. Democrats who likely are running for president have begun speaking about America in harsher ways too. In 2015, Bernie Sanders called America “a nation in which [in] many ways was created … on racist principles.” This February, Elizabeth Warren told the National Congress of American Indians that, “For generations — Congress after Congress, president after president — the government robbed you of your land, suppressed your languages, put your children in boarding schools and gave your babies away for adoption.” And she explicitly linked that past to the present, declaring that, “The kind of violence President [Andrew] Jackson and his allies perpetrated [against Native Americans] isn’t just an ugly chapter in a history book. Violence remains part of life today.”

Compare that to 2013 when Obama, in his only visit to an Indian reservation as president, told a crowd at Standing Rock merely that, “throughout history, the United States often didn’t give the nation-to-nation relationship the respect that it deserved” and that “There’s no denying that for some Americans the deck has been stacked against them, sometimes for generations. And that’s been the case for many Native Americans.”

What explains the change? One obvious answer is Donald Trump. When Obama spoke about American history as a narrative of unfolding progress, his own election served as Exhibit A. And while he acknowledged the conservative backlash it sparked, he described that backlash as temporary, a “fever” that would eventually “break.” But Trump shows that, far from breaking, the fever has intensified. Which raises the possibility that the real historical aberration was not the racist reaction to Obama’s presidency, but his presidency itself.

The shift, however, predates Trump’s election. Obama launched his political career in the 1990s and 2000s, an era relatively devoid of large-scale progressive activism. Cornel West has called it “an ice age.” That ice age began melting during Obama’s presidency, as the Occupy Movement (2011), immigrants’ rights protests (2012) and Black Lives Matter (2013) rose in rapid succession. These movements have given activists greater influence in the Democratic Party than they enjoyed a decade ago, and Democratic politicians have responded by adopting their angrier, less sentimental, language about America. After Black Lives Matter protesters disrupted Sanders’ rallies in 2015, he hired a supporter of the movement as his press secretary, and began adopting its rhetoric in his speeches. When explaining her decision to run for Congress, Ocasio-Cortez often cites her experience at the 2016 Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, where “I saw how a corporation had literally militarized itself against the American people, and I just felt like we were at a point where we couldn’t afford to ignore politics anymore.”