Clinton said so herself. In her Wellesley thesis, she criticized the radical left for indulging “the luxury of symbolic suicide.” Jeff Shields, Clinton’s then-boyfriend, told Bernstein, “If challenged philosophically, she proclaimed, ‘You can’t accomplish anything in government unless you win!’”

When Hillary followed Bill to Arkansas, she eschewed the gadfly radicalism that characterized Bernie Sanders’s early days in Vermont. Instead, she went to work for Little Rock’s tony Rose Law Firm, where she represented powerhouse local companies like Walmart and Tyson foods. By 1989, Bernstein notes, she was earning $200,000 on the side from serving on six corporate boards.

This isn’t to say that Clinton ceased being a progressive. In 1977, she founded a nonprofit called Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and she spent much of the 1980s chairing the board of Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund. But as in college, Clinton sought change by working within powerful institutions rather than seeking to overturn them. Then, as now, Clinton was—to borrow Chris Hayes’s useful dichotomy—an institutionalist rather than an insurrectionist.

Clinton’s problem today is that many progressive Millennials feel that they’ve tried it her way. In 2008, they cheered their hearts out for Barack Obama, an institutionalist who through his rhetoric and personae made incremental, inside-the-system-change inspiring. But Obama’s incrementalism hasn’t helped them much. The unemployment rate among 18- to 34-year-olds is down but still significantly higher than it was before the Great Recession. Wages for younger workers have barely risen during the weak Obama recovery. The average graduating college senior is $10,000 deeper in debt than their 2009 counterpart. All of which helps explain why record numbers of adult Millennials are still living with their parents.

It’s no surprise that the two most important progressive moments of the Obama years are Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street. Both were led by young people who, having seen the most liberal president in their lifetime fail to curb police violence or Wall Street’s power, decided that only revolutionary grassroots activism could bring systemic change. Bernie Sanders is to Occupy what Eugene McCarthy was to the student radicals of the 1960s: a way to change the system without being compromised by it. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, represents compromise. She always has.

“They want radical. It’s what they came for,” writes Molly Ball in her terrific essay about Sanders’s youth appeal. And radicalism is one attribute that Hillary Clinton—long falsely pilloried as a radical—can’t feign.

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