This is going to be a bit discursive, but bear with me. Imre Lakatos, a philosopher of science in the 60s/70s, had an idea to try to rescue science from the ea

This is going to be a bit discursive, but bear with me. Imre Lakatos, a philosopher of science in the 60s/70s, had an idea to try to rescue science from the earlier attack on it by Kuhn (or, at least, his more radical misinterpreters). A body of science isn't so much defined as a particular set of facts, but by the core theoretical underpinnings behind it. And what's key: instead of the naive falsificationism of Popper, he recognized, like Kuhn, that scientists would come up with ad hoc elaborations or patches on the core theory to save it for the day. Unlike Kuhn (or his misinterpreters), he believed that these ad hoc justifications weren't necessarily bad. They can be part of a progressive research program or a degenerative research program. The key difference being that ad hoc explanations in a progressive program enhance the explanatory power of the program--suggesting new experiments and new possible insights--while degenerative ones don't. Now I come back to your main point about political ideas. I believe this scheme can be applied to many different fields, including state political philosophy. And the issue we are seeing is that all these existing approaches--from libertarianism to Rawlsian liberalism, state socialism to anarchism--are more or less spent forces. Which is to say, the various experiments and experiences we've run all point to the reality that the only stable state is one that's run on neoliberal principles (which is ideologically a rationalistic Rawlsian state and materially a state dominated by powerful, propertied interests). All others fail, from either internal or external competition. Worse, we're unable to really run further experiments, so the ability to create alternative, progressive research programs is sharply circumscribed. Any failures of the neoliberal state are to be handled ad hoc in neoliberal frameworks. And that's as much a condemnation of all the previous attempts at state building and management as neoliberalism itself: in terms of politics, we're stuck using degenerative Newtonian mechanics despite obvious failures, and all of the critics of it are attacking it from programs that are not so much degenerative as dead. I think for anything different, we need some kind of radically disruptive technology that would change the material terms we build our society on. But how we get from here to there--or if there's even a there, there--is an entirely different question.