It's much more than "keeping a hope alive". "Hope" isn't the goal, they promote their moral ideal of collectivism and sacrifice to spread it, and they rely on it to the extent it is already intellectually and psychologically entrenched. As long as they have that, their stabs at statist policies don't have to work; they can always try something else and something more extreme, consolidating more power.

The disasters tell people they are unhappy; it doesn't tell them what is right. The only significant political opposition the left has had to worry about is the Republican theme of 'me too but slower', which is only a variation on the process and serves as a scapegoat, used to blame the results on and as demagoguery to push faster. Republicans may occasionally roll back the degree of some particular controls, but don't stop, let alone reverse, the trend.

All that prevents the whole process from going over the cliff now are the remnants of an American sense of life that balks at the extreme measures even while the moral goals are conceded. With little philosophical opposition to the establishment intellectuals, that sense of life has been diminishing. People still want their smart phones but vote for more collectivist policies. They want a higher income but increasingly vote for government-guaranteed minimum wages, 'family leave', and subsidies for medical care, education and everything else.

There is no question of "if socialism actually did work"; it doesn't and can't. Whatever is still accomplished is in spite of the collectivist statism, not because of it or compatible with it.

Whether the best people would leave depends on whether there is somewhere to go, which there increasingly is not in "one world" -- which is "one neck for one leash". What we do know is that the best stop producing or severely cut back. Very few continue producing while idealistically embracing the sacrificial ethics.

In the Soviet Union the only creative 'production' was by some theoretical scientists who thought they could continue their intellectual passion in fields like mathematics and theoretical physics -- until they were killed or ordered to do the impossible. The only people who "wound up rich" were the party elite, just like their feudalist counterparts, and even that level of wealth is arrested or collapses, with those at the top the most susceptible to assassination.