“It’s time to give socialism a try,” wrote Elizabeth Bruenig, a young 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 Ms. 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 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. Mr. 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 Ms. 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.