They aren't many other things, but they're persistent...

HotAir: France’s socialists recently gained a sizable majority of their parliament, as well as electing the ultimate champagne socialist to the presidency. 

A long time ago I wrote “Last exit to Utopia” – a book by the same title is by the author Jean-Francois Revel

I am going to be lazy & attach a bit here:

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Jean-Francois Revel writes..”socialism incarnate was always vulnerable to criticism. Utopia, on the other hand, lies by definition beyond reproach”

A detour via Utopia allows an ideology (and the power system that it purports to legitimize) to proclaim one success after another without interruption, while in reality its results are diametrically opposed to the vaunted agenda…. it promises liberty and imposes servitude; it promises equality and ends up with the most inegalitarian of all societies, with a nomenklatura class that is priviledged to a degree unknown even in feudal societies…

Many believers persist in accepting the contradictions because utopia is always located in the future.  ….

France had already experienced, and even invented, this politico-ideological configuration with Robespierre and the Jacobin dictatorship

Yippee for France. Can’t say they ever quit trying, or let a little reality get in the way.

Revel writes a great deal about how the fall of the Soviet Union actually HELPED the utopian communists in intellectual circles move forward the “benefits” of communism.

What progressives have successfully dodged, he argues, is the reality check that the end of communism should have brought about. …… Revel contends that the end of communism actually galvanised the radicals: “Now they were free,” he writes, “to idolize unreservedly a socialism restored to its pristine condition – utopia.”

Ah, the good old times. The Jacobins, the guillotine, the reign of terror – when “Liberte, fraternite, egalite” meant no one could avoid a bloodbath

If you can’t succeed in 1793 (the monarchy was re-established in France post-Napoleon), try try again – eh Hollande?