Every successful Democratic candidate of the past half century, as well as several unsuccessful ones, has embraced the idea of forward progress. John F. Kennedy sold voters on his youthful exuberance. Lyndon B. Johnson offered the Great Society. Jimmy Carter was an obscure evangelical governor from the South—about the furthest thing from Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford—who billed himself as an untainted reformer. Bill Clinton heralded a transformed, centrist Democratic Party. Barack Obama promised hope and change. Clinton offered perhaps the most eloquent and memorable formulation of this maneuver in his first inaugural address—a little old, a little new.

“Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world, but the engine of our own renewal,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

These days, most Democratic politicians are just as eager for change but less likely to look kindly on the past. Taking a radical view, they are more likely to trace the problems in contemporary American society to long-standing fissures and failures in U.S. history, especially on race, class, and gender. In other words, they believe not that Trump “will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation,” but that he’s brought out dark characteristics present since its founding. This strain in present in Bernie Sanders, whose political hero Eugene V. Debs was making systemic critiques of American society a century ago, and it’s present whenever candidates talk about reparations, which are intended to respond to sins of racism that stretch back to even before the United States itself existed. These Democrats also bluntly reject the idea of returning to a golden age.

“I don’t think you can ever have an honest politics that revolves around the word again,” Mayor Pete Buttigieg has said. While Buttigieg was clearly taking a swipe at Trump’s slogan, his implication was also that Trump, while perhaps uniquely bad, is more a symptom and an accelerant of what ails America than a cause.

Biden, however, stands against this movement. Where his rivals tend to view Trump as a culmination, Biden sees him as an aberration.

“I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time,” he said in his campaign-announcement video. “But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation—who we are—and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”

If this is true, the trick is to just turn the clock back. Biden made the comparison with Trump explicit with a paraphrase on Good Morning America on Tuesday, promising to “make America moral again.” This restorationist rhetoric, far more than any particular policy idea, has dominated Biden’s first week on the trail.