Nothing like some centrist 'common sense' for a chuckle.  They think the neoliberal engine will stop sputtering with just another tweak or two- tweaks which always will be felt by the people who do the work.  Mélenchon should be a reminder that ideas don't die, they're beaten back and hibernate. But while he seems unlikely to come out on top this election (although polls certainly cannot be taken for granted in 2017) the appeal of a more equitable society, paired with the knowledge that things were in fact once better won't disappear so easily.  The mention of the French Revolution is prescient for reasons other than the author's.  It should remind us that in a historical moment a paradigm, a way of organizing society, can melt away like butter.  You can be sure that when one of those moments shakes politics from its current limited imagination, that power-awed journalists and smug observers will be left with the sort of taste in their mouth that the First Estate once knew quite well.