During the slow unfolding of the Marxist collapse, the socialist movement they foster as a faith was often fragmented and surreptitious. Now, at this turn of a century, the movement itself is more influential in American political and cultural life than it has been at any time in the American past. According to the book's authors, during the 20th century between 85 and 100 million human beings were slaughtered in peacetime by Marxists in the effort to realize their impossible dream. That is the minimal lesson one might expect to learn from the unbroken record of the socialist utopias of the century just past. But it is exactly the lesson the Nation fervently rejects.
Socialism is dead.
Long live socialism. For Singer and the Nation, the unrelieved horror and failure of socialist experiments over the course of a century is not a lesson in sobriety for those who promoted and supported them, nor a reason to reconsider the faith. It is just a tragedy of errors that need not discourage them and need never be repeated. In other words, had there been sufficient communists in America and Europe to make revolutions there as well, the utopia that socialists had dreamed of would have been realized in fact. With communists triumphant everywhere, the Marxist fantasy would have come true.