Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont. Photograph by Jocelyn Augustino/Redux

What do progressives want now? Obviously, they want a Democratic victory in 2016—a goal for which some, but not all, of them are willing to swallow their reservations about Hillary Clinton. But there’s a larger question. After six years of the Obama Administration—which has been, from the progressive perspective, a time of important advances on issues such as health care, gay rights, and environmental regulations, but of relatively little change in other areas—what should the policy goals be going forward?

Presumably, Clinton will address this question in January, when she is expected to launch her campaign publicly. In the meantime, Bernie Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont, who, as my colleague Ryan Lizza recently wrote in the magazine, is also eyeing a 2016 run, is promoting a twelve-step “Economic Agenda for America,” which he outlined on the Senate floor Tuesday. While Sanders has about as much chance of becoming President as I have—i.e., none—he’s doing the Democratic Party, with which he caucuses, a service by issuing some specific proposals, many of which Democrats of all stripes can rally around.

As you might expect, given that the Sanders platform comes from about the only politician in the American legislature who openly describes himself as a socialist, it is overtly populist and takes aim at economic élites. On Twitter, where he maintains a busy presence, Sanders posted an image declaring, “We have a corporate establishment whose greed is destroying the economy, a political establishment which is beholden to billionaires and a media establishment which largely ignores the major issues facing working families. We need a political revolution.” During his speech in the Senate, he returned to the theme, posing the question: “Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy?”

By invoking the language of insurrection, Sanders was mimicking the tactics of right-wing Republicans, who are forever calling for a revolution in Washington. (What they really want, of course, is a counterrevolution.) But if you look closely at his proposals rather than how he packages them, it’s perfectly clear that he’s no Leninist intent on seizing the commanding heights of the economy. In many ways, he’s a traditional liberal Democrat, content to maintain the existing economic system but also eager to tilt it in a more egalitarian and green direction. In many areas, President Obama has already campaigned for versions of the policies that Sanders is putting forward, and few Clintonites would have any trouble endorsing them. The exceptions are his proposals to break up the big banks and move beyond Obamacare to a “Medicare-for-all” system of health care.

The heart of Sanders’s program is an effort to tackle wage stagnation and promote higher-paying jobs. To this end, he wants to invest a lot more public money—up to a trillion dollars—in infrastructure, to raise the minimum wage, and to make it easier for unions to organize and negotiate collective-bargaining agreements. In addition, he would seek to close the gender gap in pay, spend more on education (he doesn’t say how much), close corporate tax loopholes, and provide federal financing for the formation of worker-run coöperatives.

With the exception of promoting coöperatives, a long-standing and laudable interest of Sanders, there is nothing out of the mainstream here. Larry Summers, who worked for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and who some progressives regard as their bête noire, has long called for a big infrastructure program. Obama has repeatedly asked Congress to raise the minimum wage, close corporate loopholes, and pass a “card check” bill, which would make it easier for unions to organize. And, ever since 2009, when he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Obama has made closing the gender gap in compensation one of his priorities.

Sanders also said that he wants to “transform energy systems away from fossil fuels to create jobs while beginning to reverse global warming and make the planet habitable for future generations.” But that is a general aspiration rather than a detailed policy prescription, and it’s one that President Obama and many other Democrats have also voiced. In the past, Sanders has sponsored legislation for a carbon tax, which was, of course, stillborn. Such a proposal goes beyond the Obama Administration’s endorsement of a cap-and-trade system, but both of these policies amount to attempts to force polluters to pay a price for emitting carbon. Nor should it be forgotten that, way back in 1993, President Bill Clinton proposed a B.T.U. tax.

Sanders and his progressive supporters may come into conflict with moderate Democrats on trade, health care, and Wall Street, however. In a Huffington Post article at the start of this week, Sanders wrote, “We must end our disastrous trade policies (NAFTA, CAFTA, PNTR with China, etc.) which enable corporate America to shut down plants in this country and move to China and other low-wage countries.” Such a statement goes well beyond Sanders’s pledge, in the press release posted to his Web site on Tuesday, to “reform trade policies that have shuttered more than 60,000 factories and cost more than 4.9 million decent-paying manufacturing jobs.”

The Clinton-Obama wing of the Democratic Party, although it has adopted a somewhat more critical stance toward trade agreements—calling for them to include stricter labor laws, for example—still believes, on a fundamental level, that free trade is good for America. Likewise, Sanders’s proposal to replace the 2010 health-care reform with a public option, available to all—another policy he has supported for ages—is unlikely to gain much support from moderate Democrats who have spent years fighting with the Republicans over the Affordable Care Act.

Another potentially contentious area between progressive and moderates is the treatment of Wall Street. Progressives’ enthusiastic response, a couple of weeks ago, to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s grilling of Bill Dudley, the head of the New York Federal Reserve, demonstrated that even today, six years after the financial crisis of 2008, there’s nothing like a bit of banker-bashing to rile up the troops. Sanders, a long-standing critic of financiers and their enablers, is no slouch himself in this area. In his HuffPo article, he wrote, “Financial institutions cannot be an island unto themselves, standing as huge profit centers outside of the real economy.… They are too powerful to be reformed. They must be broken up.”

As with other elements of Sanders’s program, this is not actually a very radical proposal. If you gathered the country’s twenty leading economists, a majority of them would probably agree that, in an ideal world, banks would be a lot smaller. Given what happened in the run-up to 2008, there’s an obvious danger that, at some point, the big banks will go on another reckless lending binge, relying on the implicit promise of a bailout if they get into trouble. One way to tackle this problem would be to make the banks smaller, so that they could be allowed to fail, and the incentives they face would be very different.

Whereas a proposal to break up the banks is perfectly defensible on economic grounds, it could well prove politically toxic to a Democratic Party that, for all its ties to Main Street, remains heavily reliant on Wall Street for financial donations. The Clintons, in particular, have long-established links to firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. In addition, their economic advisers have often endorsed the mercantilist argument that America needs gargantuan banks to compete with large foreign competitors. Right now, it seems unlikely that Hillary would repudiate this argument.

That doesn’t mean she’s inevitably headed toward a bitter confrontation with the left. The Sanders manifesto shows that there are many areas where progressives and moderates can come together, and it’s in these places, surely, where Hillary will pitch her tents. But the flashpoint, if there is one, is likely to be Wall Street.