Like Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has a theory of political change. But unlike his much-discussed “political revolution,” her thoughts about how democratic transformation happens rarely get fleshed out. Yet if we attend to Clinton’s own words, she has a distinctive view of how history works. While Sanders emphasizes grassroots mobilization, Clinton is much more inclined to see politics as a matter of leaders forging a consensus—and of social progress being made when those leaders are moved to do the right thing.

Clinton’s argument that she’s a proven pragmatist who can get things done—a lynchpin of her campaign against Sanders for the Democratic nomination—rests on a view of history that highlights leaders at the expense of social movements. This often leads her to tonally off-key statements that put her at odds with her own party’s base, many of whom have been shaped by the social activism of the civil rights, feminist, and LGBT rights movements. The crucial question is whether Clinton’s comments offer a window into how she really thinks about social change—or if this is simply the way she frames issues in an effort to speak to the broader electorate.

Clinton’s elite view of history caused some consternation during her first run for president eight years ago, when she appeared to give greater credit to President Lyndon Johnson for civil rights laws than the movement lead by Martin Luther King. “I would point to the fact that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done,” Clinton said during her heated contest with Barack Obama. “That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives, because we had a president who said we are going to do it and actually got it accomplished.”

This past weekend, Clinton made two statements that echoed those remarks. Interviewed by MSNBC upon the death of former First Lady Nancy Reagan, she said, “it may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s. And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan, in particular Mrs. Reagan, we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it.”

This strange interpretation of history was met with an immediate backlash from the LGBT community, and from others with strong memories of how the Reagan administration neglected the HIV/AIDS crisis until nearly the end of the Republican president’s term in office. It wasn’t the quiet beneficence of Nancy Reagan that awoke the nation to the reality of HIV/AIDS, they pointed out, but rather the very vocal and radical activism of groups like ACT-UP and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.