This past week was perhaps one of the most important weeks in one of the most important election seasons in the history of the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Warren is on the rise. Coverage of her array of policy proposals and hard campaigning has put her in second place over Bernie Sanders in at least one national poll and a few state polls. Sanders, meanwhile, delivered a major address this past Wednesday defining “democratic socialism,” a self-applied label that sets him apart from Warren, who has called herself “capitalist to my bones.” Each putatively offers a different tack for the Party’s reinvigorated progressive wing to take against the current front-runner, Joe Biden, and President Trump in the general election.

But since Sanders entered the race many commentators have expressed the view that the substantive differences between Warren and Sanders don’t extend very far. “Why would Democratic voters choose Sanders when Warren is running?” the writer Moira Donegan asked in the Guardian earlier this year. “The two are not ideologically identical, but the differences between their major policy stances, on regulation of financial services and the need to extend the welfare state, are relatively minor, especially compared to the rest of the field.”

This is mostly true, particularly on domestic policy. A Sanders Administration may well pursue many of the proposals Elizabeth Warren has put out, from a progressive wealth tax to large new investments in affordable housing. Warren has backed Sanders’s criticisms of Amazon’s labor practices, and both candidates support the Green New Deal. There is a key difference, however, on one of the race’s key issues: Warren is a co-sponsor of Sanders’s Medicare for All bill but has yet to state whether she supports its call to eliminate private health insurance, a provision that other candidates who nominally support the Sanders plan have waffled on or rejected.

Can, or should, one draw broader abstract distinctions between the two, beyond these specific points of contrast? Donegan and others advocate for Warren over Sanders partly on the basis of Sanders’s tetchiness on identity politics. In February, for instance, he drew criticism for his comments on the political representation of women and minorities. “We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender, and not by their age,” he said in an interview. He has also voiced concerns about adopting an overly permissive immigration policy and has declined to endorse reparations for the descendants of slaves, which Warren has said that she supports.

It should also be said that Sanders and Warren talk about foreign policy differently. In an address at American University in November, Warren suggested that, at some point during the nineteen-eighties, American foreign policy had been captured and derailed by the same moneyed interests that she argues have rigged the economy, further bloating the country’s military-industrial complex and fuelling reckless, expensive, and counterproductive interventions. “The defense industry will inevitably have a seat at the table—but they shouldn’t get to own the table,” she said. “It is time to identify which programs actually benefit American security in the twenty-first century, and which programs merely line the pockets of defense contractors—then pull out a sharp knife and make some cuts.”

Sanders’s critique of American foreign policy generally runs deeper and goes back farther. In his foreign-policy speeches, Sanders refers to decades’ worth of failures and moral disasters—including American support for the Iranian coup of 1953 and the overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende, twenty years later—to make the case that American foreign policy has long been destructive, under both Democratic and Republican Administrations. “Far too often, American intervention and the use of American military power has produced unintended consequences which have caused incalculable harm,” he said in a speech at Westminster College, in 2017. “Yes, it is reasonably easy to engineer the overthrow of a government. It is far harder, however, to know the long-term impact that that action will have.” He has also been increasingly critical of Israel, going so far as to say that it is now run by a “right-wing, dare I say, racist government” during a televised town hall in April. “I am not anti-Israel,” he added. “But the fact of the matter is that Netanyahu is a right-wing politician who I think is treating the Palestinian people extremely unfairly.”

But the starkest apparent point of contrast lies in how the two candidates describe themselves ideologically. Sanders calls himself a socialist; Elizabeth Warren identifies as a capitalist. The two ideologies, as traditionally conceived, are, on paper, diametrically opposed. You either believe that the productive constituent parts of the economy should be controlled by workers themselves or the state or you do not.

But Sanders has complicated things. His campaign is reportedly contemplating proposals that would expand worker ownership and management in the United States, and Sanders has sponsored legislation aimed at providing worker-owned firms with financial assistance and guidance. But worker ownership has not, as yet, figured largely into the descriptions of socialism Sanders has offered on the Presidential campaign trail.

The vision of socialism that Sanders has offered instead, in his speech this past Wednesday and elsewhere, amounts to a resurrection of New Deal liberalism. “By rallying the American people, F.D.R. and his progressive coalition created the New Deal, won four terms, and created an economy that worked for all and not just the few,” Sanders said on Wednesday. “Today, New Deal initiatives like Social Security, unemployment compensation, the right to form a union, the minimum wage, protection for farmers, regulation of Wall Street, and massive infrastructure improvements are considered pillars of American society.” In his speech, Sanders also offered a “Twenty-First Century Economic Bill of Rights” inspired by the “Second Bill of Rights” that Roosevelt proposed in his 1944 State of the Union, which includes the right to a job paying a living wage, quality health care, affordable housing, education, a clean environment, and a secure retirement.

Perhaps the bulk of the speech was pitched as a rejoinder to criticisms from the right. “Let me be clear. I do understand that I and other progressives will face massive attacks from those who attempt to use the word ‘socialism’ as a slur,” he said. “But I should also tell you that I have faced and overcome these attacks for decades—and I am not the only one.” He went on to list a selection of those attacks, including Al Smith’s claim, in 1936, that the Democratic Party’s platform had come to resemble the Socialist Party’s platform, as a slur against Roosevelt and the New Deal. This was, remarkably, Sanders’s only reference to the American socialist movement. “Socialism” certainly was deployed as a slur by Smith, but Sanders said nothing to suggest that there might have been something good or admirable about the Socialist Party’s platform. There was praise for the programs of Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. Eugene V. Debs, a man Sanders once wrote an audio documentary about, was not mentioned once.

Sanders instead described socialism by dichotomy—on one hand, he said, there is “democratic socialism,” a system of social provision for ordinary working people. “We must recognize that, in the twenty-first century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights,” he said. “That is what I mean by ‘democratic socialism.’ As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ‘Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.’ ”