When Joe Biden made his first bid for president, he was forced to drop out after plagiarizing British Labour leader Neil Kinnock in a Democratic debate. Now, in his third run for the White House, Biden is plagiarizing himself. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to restore America’s soul,” he bellowed at the Iowa Democratic Steak Fry in May 1987. Thirty-two years later, almost to the day, miraculously sporting more hair cover than his balding dome had back then, Biden kicked off his 2020 campaign in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by proclaiming, “We’re in a battle for America’s soul—I really believe it—and we have to restore it.”

Politicians can’t help but repeat themselves on the campaign trail, of course; like bands on tour, they tend to fall back on the tried-and-true. The trouble with Biden isn’t that his rhetoric hasn’t changed in three decades. It’s that his politics haven’t, either.

Back then, Biden was a central figure in transforming the party of New Deal and Great Society liberalism into a welfare-reforming, tax-cutting, crime-fighting, corporate-friendly cousin of the GOP. “The arc of Biden’s long career,” as Esquire columnist Charles Pierce wrote earlier this year, “follows in close harmony the endless attempts by the Democratic Party to backtrack on its most profound principles in order to bring back people who have been taught to hate it.”

The rationale for all that backtracking, in the ’80s and ’90s, was that Democrats had lost five out of six presidential elections. Meanwhile, their hundred-year hegemony in the “Solid South” was fast eroding as Republicans took advantage of the white backlash to civil rights and feminism. “Moderate” Democrats like Biden and Bill Clinton joined mainstream pundits and big donors in spreading the idea that the party would never recapture the White House without recapturing the souls of white folk in Dixie.

We know how that played out: The centrists won the argument and, when Clinton rode the “New Democrat” agenda to victory in 1992, Lite Republicanism became the official strategy of the Democratic Party. But white Southerners, the ostensible rationale for trading progressivism for “pragmatism,” never came back to the fold; instead, they became a solid base for the GOP, which served up an ever-purer form of white supremacy, Bible-beating patriarchy, and free-market malarkey. Meanwhile, the emerging majority of people of color and white progressives became uninspired part-time voters, rolling their collective eyes at the Democrats’ empty talk about economic and racial justice.