These tensions lasted well into the New Deal, the crowning years of America’s enthusiasm for reform. New Dealers held on to progressive ideas while sloughing off some of the moralizing. Over time, though, their economic policies ushered in what the historian Alan Brinkley has described, in the title of a 1995 book, as “The End of Reform.” The New Deal, he wrote, grew from a complex tradition of progressive reform, then “attached the word ‘liberalism’ to it, and set about transforming it.” The new liberals ultimately pinned their hopes on economic growth and Keynesian tinkering, not the trickier task of actively redistributing wealth and power. Over the decades that followed, they would orient themselves increasingly toward civil and social rights rather than sweeping economic reform, a subtle but important shift.

This may have spelled the “end” of a certain mode of reform, but it did little to change reform’s association with progressives and liberals — even when it was taken up by their opponents. In 1955, the historian Richard Hofstadter published a book whose title named the period from the 1890s through the 1940s “The Age of Reform.” He accepted as axiomatic that reformers came from “the side of the left in American history.” Still, he noted, there was now a tendency among conservative politicians to claim “reform” and “reformer” as gauzy, feel-good labels. “We usually reserve our highest acclaim for the politician who has in him a touch of the liberal reformer,” Hofstadter wrote. As a result, any talented conservative politician learned how to “exert his maximal influence by using the rhetoric of progressivism and winning the plaudits of the reformers” — while otherwise working against what most progressives would want.

Six decades later, a similar impulse seems to hold sway in Washington. While Democrats search for a muscular patriotic language to win back Trump voters (or galvanize their own), Republicans and conservatives seem happy enough to claim the gentler mantle of reform, especially when facing popular skepticism or outright hostility toward their policy proposals. Having accomplished “tax reform,” Speaker Paul Ryan now dreams of “entitlement reform,” through which he envisions reducing the deficit by cutting back on signature liberal programs like Medicare and Social Security. In a recent open letter sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, 12 conservative figures urged Ryan, along with Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, not to forget about “health reform,” by which they mean continuing the effort to undo Obamacare. Several signers of that letter have been described as “reform conservatives,” a loose term that signals inside-the-Beltway policy seriousness while creating distance from the more xenophobic elements of the Republican Party.

Not all aspects of reform carry quite the same partisan or ideological tinge. “Criminal-justice reform,” intended to reduce the harms of mass incarceration, seems to be one of the few genuinely bipartisan agenda items in Washington. (Trump himself, who rails against “savage” criminals, has spoken about “reforming our prisons to help former inmates who have served their time get a second chance.”) “Campaign-finance reform” occasionally rallies support across party lines, as do a few select aspects of “immigration reform.”

But even those issues — narrow, practical and still contentious — point to some of the limits of reform right now. A century ago, reform meant coming up with inspiring new ideas that would lead to greater justice, a confidence that human planning and ingenuity could accomplish grand and transformative things. Now it seems to mean, at best, restrained corrective measures — and far more often than that, actively undoing the policies of the past, an act of hardheaded resignation rather than of collective hope. Reform once promised a future of unparalleled opportunity. Today, it often marks the opposite, a loss of faith in the idea of progress itself.