I've been going through this for maybe 5+ years, as regular readers may have noticed. What surprises me is that apparently mystified 'good' ideologies' don't automatically displace 'bad' ones. I'd have thought that someone with his experience and insight would have engaged with the science of group dynamics and so on.

As a leftie, I think part of the problem is that when the USSR went down to defeat, instead of the internet being developed as a tool of democracy it was developed as one of commerce instead, and much of the developed world reacted to the (apparent) failure of socialism by declaring victory and going shopping. Turns out that people find the idea of consumption as the end of society meaningless and unsatisfying.