Back in the 1990’s, most people knew Bill Clinton was a crook and a degenerate, but people also knew he would never be held to account. An unspoken truth of the age was that a big part of the frustration with the Clinton crime family was really over the unwillingness of the so-called conservatives to get tough. The National Review types carried on like they were too good to get into the outrage over the endless stream of scandals surrounding Team Clinton. They were above that stuff.

As a result, talking about the Clinton shenanigans became a staple of talk radio, mostly because it was amusing, but also as a form of outrage porn. Every time one of them got away with some obvious lie, the phone lines would light up with people ready to talk about how angry they were about it. In other words, a big part of the Clinton hating was over the fact they kept getting away with it, because the political class, particularly the so-called principled conservatives, lacked the stones to do anything about it.

That’s an important thing to keep in mind while watching the Left wrestle with the fact Trump will not be sent to prison for treason. To normal people, the Russian collusion stuff was always a nutty conspiracy theory. It seemed obvious that the point of the Russian collusion narrative was to distract people from the fact the Obama White House was engaged in activity that would have made Nixon blush. If there was a conspiracy, it was the media running cover for the crooks in the Obama administration.

This understanding blinded people to what could be the most important part of the Russian collusion story. The Left really believed it. They really thought there was a secret conspiracy between Trump people and Putin people to work some secret magic to alter the 2016 election. They did not know the nature of this magic. In fact, it was probably supernatural, but the Left was sure it was real. This is something people outside the Progressive hive are just starting to realize. The Left really is that crazy.

The juxtaposition of the Clinton haters and the NeverTrump people is a good way of understanding the vast chasm between the Progressive worldview and that of normal people. The hatred of the Clintons was rooted in a grudging acceptance of the reality of modern politics. It was a lament, more than a set of beliefs. People knew they were crooks, but also knew the so-called conservatives were wimps and liars. Bill Clinton in the White House was the symptom of the disease that had infected the nation’s elite.

The NeverTrump stuff is something different. It’s rooted in a fantasy about how the world is organized and the role the Left plays in it. They really do believe in mysterious forces that operate on the fringes. They not only think there is a man behind the curtain, but that the curtain itself is part of an elaborate conspiracy. Most important, they deeply believe that the arc of history bends toward the Promised Land and that they are on the right side of history, leading the rest of us into the light of salvation. They really do think that.

It’s why their response to the Mueller report has been like the response to the sudden death of a child. They were not convinced some Trump people had some shady dealings with the Russians. They were sure there was an elaborate conspiracy that altered the election. That was the key part of their coping system for the last two plus years. The conspiracy altered the election. The arc of history was not altered. The bad guys were not able to legitimately defeat those on the right side of history. The devil real!

Cults have ways to deal with disconfirmation, but there must be a way to salvage some of the original core belief from the wreckage. If the aliens were supposed to arrive on Tuesday, but failed to show, the cult can explain this by claiming they got the dates wrong or that they failed to perform the proper ritual. In this case, the Left can’t seem to find a way to salvage the core belief from the wreckage, because the core belief had to be completely true in order to confirm their role in the Great Russian collusion narrative.

What we’re seeing with the Left is a child learning that they have not only been adopted, but they have been in a coma their whole life and everything they believe about themselves is a dream. Rachel Maddow right now is someone sure she was a Jewish TV lesbian, but has learned she is really white guy with two kids and an ex-wife, working at the Home Depot. Everything about who she was in the moral sense is not just false, it never existed. As a result, she never really existed. She was part of the fraud.

That’s why the audience has evaporated for these lefty chat shows. Conservatives will try to explain this in the same dimwitted way they explain everything, by focusing on the fact these shows promoted a fake story. In reality, we’re witnessing the collapse of an identity cult, built around the belief in a sinister conspiracy to snatch away the 2016 election from forces of light. The collapse of the central narrative is also the collapse of the core of this identity cult. These are now people without a reason to exist.

For a time, it looked as if the “yellow vests” revolt was going to shakeup French politics by legitimizing populist issues. The protests were mainly focused on economic issues, but those issues are the sorts of things that highlight the divide between the cosmopolitan ruling class and the general public. That is the heart of the great political divide in the current age. The ruling class and its supporters are living a fantasy life paid for in a million small ways by the unorganized and ignored masses making up the general public.

That’s really what the yellow vest protesters were about initially. As is always the case with revolts, what got them in the streets were the little things, but those little things were symbolic of the bigger problem. The yellow vest originated from the nutty law that requires all French drivers to keep a yellow safety vest in their car. Whether or not having such a thing is a good idea is not really the point. It is the symbol of elite attitudes that result in the proliferation of thousands of such laws.

Half a year on now and it looks like the yellow vest revolt has followed the same arc as all previous efforts to oppose the prevailing order. In France the protest culture is a part of the political system. It’s not just a left-wing phenomenon, like it is in America. It’s how the political factions rally support and press their case to the public. A populist movement joining the system offered some hope that a genuine alternative could emerge. Instead, it appears that the establishment has found a way to corrupt and de-legitimize it.

Now, Scott McConnell is a yesterday man, stubbornly attached to a politics of a bygone era, but what he describes should be familiar to anyone who has followed dissident politics. What made the Gilets Jaunes initially effective was their authenticity. They were just regular people expressing their complaints the only way available to them. The fact that they had to go into the streets underscored their legitimacy. These were not the sort who engaged in protest. They voted and wrote letters to the editor.

The Gilets Jaunes are like the Tea Party movement in America. What made the Tea Party work initially was the fact it was organized by normal people, not political professionals with hidden agendas. Like the Tea Party, this ordinariness, and the lack of organizational structure, made the Gilets Jaunes vulnerable. At some point, the French equivalent of Antifa showed up to start smashing things. Muslim groups joined into the attack Jews on camera. In Paris, Gilets Jaunes is now just a weekly bit of anarchy.

Something similar happened with the Tea Party in America. Instead of radical leftists, it was political barnacles like the R Street crowd. These are the political shape-shifters, who always turn up in conservative circles. Their job is to co-opt and neuter anything resembling a legitimate challenge to the people in power. In the case of the Tea Party, they jumped in, wrestled control of the name and many of the organizations away from the grass roots and turned the whole thing into cover for the GOP establishment.

A common theme to all of these failed opposition movements is the decision to engage in the established political system. Once they connect to the system, the system releases a virus that either assimilates the new group, turning it into a feature of the system, or kills off the threat. The former case is a universal in life. When the king recognizes a threat to his rule, the first move is to buy off the threat. Offering him a position in the system, in exchange for him adding his legitimacy to the king and his ruling order.

The latter is the one that is most puzzling, as it suggests legitimate opposition lacks the right antibodies to function in a modern liberal democracy. A recent example in America was the alt-right. When it was a humorous on-line enterprise, operating outside the political system, it was effective at introducing paleocon ideas into the flow of social media. Those memes making sport of ruling class piety were highly effective. The alt-right operated like a highly diffuse guerrilla movement, using mockery and satire to undermine order.

Then Richard Spencer started imagining himself as the leader of a vanguard and started to stage protests and go on speaking tours. The shift from underground guerrilla movement to above ground political activism was a disaster. Quickly, Spencer became David Duke 2.0, which gave the Left cover to send in their street mobs. Woke capital joined in and the entire dissident scene was subjected to an ongoing pogrom that persists to this day. The alt-right exploded and has followed the Tea Party into the dustbin.

Decades ago, Sam Francis observed that the Buckley brand of conservatism was bound to fail, because it sought to engage in politics on Progressive terms. By engaging in conventional politics, Buckley was legitimizing not only the rules of the game, but the roles for the participants as created by the Left. Since the Left controlled the institutions, they would always set the rules so they would win and the Buckleyites would lose. That is, of course, exactly how things unfolded. Conservatism was a failure.

Something similar happened with the Tea Party, the alt-right and now the Gilets Jaunes in France. By trying to play by the rules, they legitimize that which they claim to oppose, at least at a meta-political level. It also removes from them the one weapon all outsider movements possess. That is the willingness to break the rules. The flipping over of tables inside the temple is how these movements gain attention and attract followers. To then be seen putting the tables back and sitting behind them robs the movement of energy.

Something else seems to be at work. These movements all suffered from poor leadership and poor organization. The first Tea Party folks were honest, energetic, but wildly naive about the reality of political organization. The alt-right figures that rose up in 2015 were good at getting attention, but incapable of building organizations. Richard Spencer is media savvy, but you would not put him in charge of anything. The Gilets Jaunes appears to also lack capable leadership, which is why they have been taken over by the Left.

What this suggests is that any legitimate opposition must first insulate itself from the political system. Its guerrilla phase cannot be where they start, but where the end, in order to function as a subversive subculture in opposition to the prevailing order. The Vietcong and the Khmer Rouge did not fully come out of the shadows until the prevailing order was collapsing. It was at that point they rushed into fill the void. If there is to be a legitimate opposition in the West, it is going to operate in the shadows.