Hillary Clinton thinks she’s running for president, but instead she may be running right into the buzzsaw of history.

Clinton, for the second time in eight years, could see her personal and political ambitions spoiled by an electorate that seems to yearn for change on a seismic scale, rather than the incremental progress she embodies. Just as in 2008, Clinton appears to be a candidate who’s out of step with the zeitgeist.

She still has time to turn it around, but she’ll have to connect with a fearful electorate in a way she hasn’t yet been able to. Paradoxically for a Democrat and a self-professed progressive, her easiest path to the presidency may be to appeal to Americans’ inherent conservatism, their fear of wrenching change.

“ A new order is coming, and there are no guarantees about what will come next, whether the new order will bring more liberty, equality, peace and prosperity, or less. ”

The conventional wisdom holds that Clinton — and the Democratic establishment that has lined up behind her coronation as the nation’s first woman president — has misread the mood of a country that’s angry, fearful and skeptical of any politician whose central message is essentially conservative (in the original sense of a political philosophy that seeks to conserve and protect the status quo.)

It’s true that politicians like Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton have missed the message of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz in the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign. Many voters, conceivably a majority, don’t want to preserve a political and economic system that’s not working for them or their families. They say they want to tear it down.

The political and economic elites, who are now the main beneficiaries of that system, can no longer dictate who our leaders shall be. They can no longer limit the terms of the political debate into a narrow framework that ranges all the way from A to B, from slightly conservative to slightly liberal. Other ideas are now up for discussion.

The forces of creative destruction that are disrupting the old and entrenched business models are now disrupting the old and entrenched political rules. A new order is coming, and there are no guarantees about what will come next, whether the new order will bring more liberty, equality, peace and prosperity, or less.

And in this climate of change, candidates who offer slogans like “Don’t Rock the Boat,” or “Change Is Hard” are running an uphill battle.

That is essentially Hillary Clinton’s argument against Bernie Sanders: Change is hard. She argues that the only way to advance a progressive agenda is through incremental change. Blowing up the system risks giving back all those hard-earned victories. She knows the levers of power, and Sanders doesn’t. He’s a pie-in-the-sky dreamer, while she can get things done.

You don’t get to universal health care, for instance, all at once, Clinton argues. It may take decades: First, you get Medicare for older people, then Medicaid for the poorest, and then CHIP for children, and then Obamacare to expand health coverage to those with pre-existing health problems and those who don’t have coverage through their job. And so on, one step at a time.

As that famous gradualist Mao said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

But Sanders has a different view of change. In his reading of history, big changes have never come from liberal politicians in Washington urging patience, but from grassroots movements that demanded change now and forced the politicians to get on board or get swept aside by the tide of history.

As that other famous gradualist Franklin D. Roosevelt allegedly told the great civil rights and labor leader A. Phillip Randolph: “I agree with you, now go out and make me do it.”

The right of same-sex marriage, for instance, wasn’t incrementally won according to some blueprint laid out by career politicians, but by activists all across the nation educating their families, friends and neighbors and creating a mass movement that changed public opinion. Persuading the politicians and the courts was the last step in that revolution, not the first.

And it’s been the same story for every great progressive cause, from civil rights and food safety to the rights of workers and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Change doesn’t come from the top down, but from below.

But if it is true, then why is Sanders trying to be the top guy?

The conventional wisdom of this election is that voters want drastic changes. They are flocking to Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and even Marco Rubio because they don’t like the direction the country is going. However, the real question for the electorate this year is which direction they’d prefer: backward or forward?

The conventional wisdom ignores human nature at its peril. Most people are resistant to big changes. Psychologically, we much prefer to preserve what we have rather than risk it all for the chance of getting something better. Most people are risk-averse in their investments, and it’s true in politics as well.

When is the last time the American people used the political system to overthrow the existing order? 1776?

If the November election pits Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump, or Hillary Clinton vs. Ted Cruz, will a majority of voters be ready to trade what they have for the unknown?

Will they give up their health insurance? Or the regulations that keep our skies clean, our water drinkable and our economy safe? Will they throw away the progressive tax system? Or Social Security, Medicare and the rest of the fragile safety net? What about the progress this nation has made in advancing the rights and opportunities of everyone, not just white males? Not to mention the economic progress the country has made since 2009?

At this point in the campaign, many voters seem ready to cast their lot with candidates who promise to blow up everything and start over.

But Hillary Clinton may yet connect with the majority of voters with the simple and common-sense view that “Half a Loaf Is Better Than None” and “A Bird in the Hand Really Is Better Than Two in the Bush.”