Bernie Sanders delivered his speech on reforming Wall Street in New York on Tuesday. It was not solely a speech about breaking up the banks and restoring the firewall between investment and commercial banking, although you wouldn’t know that from the headlines. It was also not merely a speech about who, precisely, was responsible for the last crisis.

Sanders’ additional points of emphasis—the ones you didn’t hear so much about—illustrated that he recognizes the fundamental choice in financial reform, between a go-slow approach to tweak up weak points in the system and a radical alteration in design. That recognition matters, even if the Vermont senator doesn’t always focus on what’s currently wrong with the industry—and even if he cannot accomplish everything he laid out.

Hillary Clinton and her top surrogates have tried to obfuscate the larger divide—between technocratic tinkering and overhaul—throughout the campaign. They inevitably steer the debate back to whether banks were solely responsible for the financial crisis, to prove that restoring the Glass-Steagall firewall (so named for the authors of the Depression-era reform) is an insufficient protection. They highlight the “shadow banking” system, the groups of hedge funds and special lending vehicles that sit outside the regulatory perimeter, to attest that their ideas are more comprehensive.

In truth, writing banks out of the 2008 story is deeply wrong. After all, the largest banks all funded mortgage originators with warehouse lines of credit. They all packaged and sold mortgage-backed securities, bought pieces of those securities to create credit derivatives, and fueled the rotten lending and magnification of risk that heralded the collapse (to say nothing of servicing most of the mortgages, which produced the most predatory practices of the entire crisis). Selling a flawed version of the financial crisis leads to bad choices about what risks to prevent in the future.

But focusing on the past distracts from the real cleavage inside the Democratic Party on financial reform: propping up the current system or throwing it out. We know where Sanders stands on that. He sees banks as an antitrust problem that needs resolving for reasons of political economy as much as financial instability. He wants to ring-fence deposits away from investment banking activity, so the savings of ordinary workers aren’t caught up in what amounts to a gambling ring.