Aren't you just telling us to dream small(er) again?

The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School had far grander aspirations, for instance.

But anyway, this is concordant with my point: it's important to properly assess how much bigger to dream.

However, just because academics must interface with politics to get terrible ideas enacted, it doesn't mean that the interfacing will reveal the terrible ideas as terrible until after terrible things have already happened (and with confirmation bias, we might not notice even then--look at all the libertarians who observe the various problems of shifting to a more libertarian approach and then claim that the problems are all due to it not being even more libertarian). It's still important as academics to understand the degree of certainty we have about various matters.