For the past six months, it’s been hard not to “feel the Bern.” Stepping into the political space opened up by Occupy, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has done what many thought impossible: inject a class discourse into the Democratic nomination race.

But it is a telling bit of historical amnesia that Sanders’s call for a “political revolution” does not bring to mind the last time a self-described “political revolution” was engineered within the Democratic Party: the New Politics movement.

Born amid the Democratic Party’s crisis in 1968 and drawing together activists from antiwar, civil rights, and feminist struggles, as well as the labor-left, New Politics diagnosed the limits and failures of Democratic policies as the product of an insufficiently democratic party. The reformers sought to build an ideologically coherent, disciplined organization that could formulate and implement a popular, social-democratic program — a project they described as “democratizing the Democratic Party.”