The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.

Davies is pointing to a common psychological and political habit: people often describe their hopes in the language of progress, but what they really want is restoration—an imagined “better time” purified of its conflicts and complexities. The “idealized past” is not history as it was, but a selective memory shaped by nostalgia, fear of change, and a desire for stability or lost status. The line also hints at how rhetoric about the future can mask conservatism or regression, and how societies can become trapped by mythic narratives of decline and return rather than engaging honestly with present realities.