“It’s time to give socialism a try,” wrote Elizabeth Bruenig, an opinion columnist, in the Washington Post in March. As you may have heard, the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos who, on the same day that Bruenig’s article appeared, was identified as the richest person in the world, with a fortune of $112 billion. Within days, Forbes, which makes it its business to know such things, had amended that figure on the basis of a surge in the Amazon.com stock price to $130 billion. There is no record of any reproof by “the world’s first centi-billionaire” of his employee for denigrating the economic system which had enabled him to amass such fabulous riches, but since the Washington Post under his ownership has been moving inexorably in the ideological direction of the Daily Worker, you wouldn’t really expect there to be. Bezos has become just the latest rich man in the tradition established by Friedrich Engels and continued by George Soros to try to ingratiate himself with potential anti-“capitalist” revolutionaries by subsidizing them.

Not that Bruenig would appear to know anything about that. The word “time” in her headline implies some sense of historical perspective, but there turns out to be none. Second only to “capitalism” among the things that she dislikes is what she calls “everyday Fukuyama-ism,” and yet she herself may be the only living exponent, not excepting Francis Fukuyama himself, of the pure “End of History” thesis. For her indeed, history is so far ended that it is as if it never existed. If she is aware that the historical moment for giving socialism a “try” has ever occurred before in human history, there is no sign of it in the article. After the Twitterstorm that blew up when it was published, she wrote another in reply suggesting that she hadn’t mentioned the Soviet Union or other “totalitarian” socialist examples because that would have implied she was herself a totalitarian socialist — and, by the way, she wasn’t. So her opponents’ bringing them up was to her a sign of their “bad faith,” a concept she thinks was invented by Jean-Paul Sartre.