Marxism has long scorned backward-looking ideologies. The Communist Manifesto’s last section is a bracing polemic against those who adopt the mantle of socialism in order to defend feudal backwardness; Lenin’s first major work was an argument with radicals who hoped that Russia could avoid capitalist modernization; and Bertolt Brecht famously advised leftists: “Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones.” Marx’s discussion of the European revolutions of 1848 contains one of the most interesting variations on this theme, noting that while the upheavals clothed themselves in the garb of antiquity, the socialist revolution “cannot take its poetry from the past, but only from the future.”

While these reflections on the ideological character of appeals to tradition are well-taken, the last few decades have revealed that a politics of the future can be no less fantastical. Exhibit A is the Third Way — the attempt, most notably in the United States and the United Kingdom, to chart a centrist path between conservatism and social democracy. The Left’s traditional ambitions to restrain the market, Third Way acolytes argued, were too old-fashioned, unsuited to the environs of modern capitalism. In the United States, these politics formed the basis of the Clinton and Obama presidencies, and in the UK, the premierships of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Today, the Third Way is in ruins. Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to the Labour Party leadership marked a decisive repudiation of Blairite New Labour, and even though his recent election loss was a devastating one, there is little evidence that Blair’s ideological brethren will be able to capitalize on it to regain control of the party. In the United States, Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the hands of Donald Trump demonstrated the diminishing electoral returns of centrism. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, the heir apparent of the US Third Way, is running a campaign based solely on restoring Obama’s ancien régime, a pitch not one whit less backward-looking and nostalgic than Trump’s atavistic appeal to “Make America Great Again.”