A note on politics
It's often claimed that conservatives are realists and liberals are idealists, but in fact, there are such things as a conservative idealist and a liberal realist. A right-wing idealist typically believes that free markets and trickle-down will eventually create a libertarian utopia in which everyone is rich. A left-wing "realist" typically believes that governments are just as bad as corporations and will probably always be so, because power corrupts; that anarchism would be nice but will never be achieved; and that in general, humanity as a whole is incapable of learning from its mistakes and will be perishing from the face of the Earth in short order. Whether any of this is really realistic, I don't know, but it's certainly not idealistic by any stretch.