Originally a comment by Alan Peakall on Progress has a plan.

Perhaps better history teaching covering the real ugly complexity of the moral struggles of the past should be part of the solution. A good example to start with would the the checkered relationship between the anti-slavery Republican Party of Lincoln and the nativist penumbra adjacent to it which gave rise to a vociferously anti immigrant state government in Massachussets with a sterling record of socially reformist measures. Instead popular culture gives us Gangs of New York.

Around the beginning of the current century the aphorism that Marxism filled a God-shaped hole was succeeded by the wisecrack that European integration filled a Marx-shaped hole. I think that Francis Spufford captured the idea more elegantly at the conclusion of Red Plenty in the rhetorical question “Can it be otherwise?”. It’s because we are human that it can’t be otherwise and equally because we are human that we can’t accept that it can’t be otherwise.