Hawaii Democrats caucus this Saturday to express their presidential preferences — and in so doing will help define their party’s future. Will the party resurrect its former policies of economic and social justice or continue decades of moral dormancy arising from a strategic decision made in the 1990s to accommodate, rather than fight, the growing power of corporations, Wall Street and the opponents of “bloated government?”

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont carries the torch for restoring the party’s traditional liberal economic policies. That he’s battling longtime party icon and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton couldn’t be more appropriate.

Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and his comrades in the Democratic Leadership Council spearheaded the move away from the economic populism Democrats had championed for 50 years following the Great Depression.

After the “Reagan Revolution” and the 1984 and 1988 defeats of blue state liberals Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis — and with eyes on their own presidential ambitions — Bill Clinton and fellow Southerner Al Gore and other “New Democrats” leaned right on economic policy to get on board with the changing times.

They supported free trade agreements, Wall Street deregulation, welfare reform and less progressive tax and spending policies. To placate the party’s liberals, they aligned themselves with the left side of the “culture wars,” embracing the women’s movement, abortion, gun control and gay rights.

The labor movement, already under attack from the right, was sacrificed in the deal, creating a festering party wound largely ignored until Sanders came along with promises to salve it.

Can’t Unring The Bell Sanders Has Rung

That a lifelong independent is stirring the party to reconsider its traditional commitments, though ironic, makes perfect sense historically. Rather than join Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats,” Sanders built his political career as an independent — outspoken and progressive — keeping him immune from dubious compromises most party candidates had to make in the years after the 1992 Clinton/Gore election.

This gives Sanders both the perspective and the credibility to advocate policies that most Democratic leaders barely remember, let alone champion.

But times have changed again, and what Ronald Reagan sowed with the complicity of those ambitious Democrats has now fully blossomed. Wall Street excesses ruined the economy, millions of jobs were exported overseas, growing income inequalities shrunk the once broad middle class, creating economic disparities rivaling those in corrupt fiefdoms like Saudi Arabia. Our schools are underfunded, infrastructure is crumbling, and corporate campaign donations so compromise Congress that governing has been all but arrested, to say nothing of social progress.

Sanders’ grassroots campaign has inspired young people, workers and victims of the unfair economy — along with fresh Democratic officeholders like U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — to imagine a party that could again champion the kinds of policies that marked its greatest accomplishments, including the New Deal, New Frontier and Great Society.

The fruits of 30 years of almost unfettered corporate power and an imminent threat of oligarchy set the stage for Sanders, who is old enough to remember what the Democratic Party once stood for and who has given Democrats an opportunity to resurrect something they lost long ago.

Even if Sanders fails to wrestle the presidential nomination from the party establishment’s favored candidate, his call for economic and social justice likely will persist, carried forward by the young people he’s drawn into his campaign.

If it’s true that you can’t unring a bell, the Democratic Party’s future seems destined to be influenced again by traditions it walked away from long ago. And we have Bernie Sanders to thank for that.