A peculiar mode of thought I often encounter when reading books by leftish authors (such as The Salaried Masses by Kracauer) is they assume all sorts of past evils have by now been abolished. Leftish thinkers appear to fancy a progress that never took place. In reality, upon scrutinizing various claims, we discover the imagined past evils are not only still there, but they are not evils.
For example, the modern leftish thinker assumes it to be a historical truth that class-based society in Europe was abolished by the end of the nineteenth century. The Marxist revolution took care of it, right? Well, it never happened. The bourgeoisie never went away. The rich simply moved out of their first-floor city apartments and went on to live in gated communities at the edge of the suburbs.
