>> His point is that there is no socialist tradition, and the illusion that
>> there was some magical socialist period we can return to is a pernicious
>> myth.
>
> A trivial banality.
Not trivial at all, actually a profound insight into how ideology works. The US version of the same phenomenon is the cynical realism of the market - the go-getting, do-it-yourself, big-government-is-bad mindset, with its attendant utopias of returning to a small-town democracy and a yeoman farmer economy. One sees this ideology everywhere in US politics today, from the tiniest details of suburban strip malls up to the catastrophic geopolitics of the oiligarchy.
-- DRR