One of my articles of faith is that there are no conspiracies, only stupid efforts to cover things up.

Hello, Intelligence Community!

In the last week or so, we have seen the unraveling of the Russia collusion narrative, the notion that the Trump presidential campaign was in bed with the Reds.

Imagine!  Not under the bed, as in olden times, when the left did it, but actually in bed with the pesky Russkies!  I can't believe the Trumpists did that!

Here is the shocking truth.  In addition to its vital national task of surveilling the world to detect the plans of terrorists, prevent school shootings, and foil MS-13 in its animalistic designs, our Intelligence Community found time to snag some peripheral Trump campaign hangers-on into compromising positions by asking them about Russians and emails.  And that gave them a reason to wiretap these peripheral campaign hangers-on using the carefully crafted protocols in the nation's wise counterintelligence laws.  Gradually, the project to spy on the Trump campaign – you know, just in case – morphed into a conspiracy to avoid facing the embarrassment of the exposure of government spying on the out-of-power party's campaign.

Outrageous!  Monstrous!  A vile plot to undermine "our Democracy"!

But I am comforted by all of this.  We have learned over the months that these Deep State hangers-on are merely fools and knaves, from Brennan to Clapper, from Comey to McCabe and the lovebird twins, and don't forget the inimitable Stefan Halper, who appears to have enjoyed too many counterintelligence lunches at his London club.

Did somebody say "what did the president know and when did he know it?"

We conservatives love to rail at the Administrative State and its monstrous injustices, and we are right to do so.  But it is comforting to know what "dull routinists" they all are, to steal a phrase beloved by Ludwig von Mises.

All this is "worse than Watergate" because back then – imagine this if you can – the FBI refused to help President Nixon dish the opposition.  But this time, the FBI jumped right in the hot tub with the Kool Kidz and started texting.  And why wouldn't these guys party with the best of them?  The Deep State just needed an insurance policy to make sure that Trump didn't make it, and I expect that the received wisdom among the smart set was that the carefully crafted "October surprise" of the Access Hollywood tape would do the trick and keep the "not our kind, darling" Trump out of the White House.  So everyone just went through the motions – texting, and hot-tubbing, and lunching as usual – and didn't actually bother to use the FISA-approved surveillance to bring down candidate Trump.

That is the point.  The people inside a modern administrative bureaucracy are all just going through the motions.  They do not have a strategic view of what they are doing.  They are like cells in a body, jiggling away without a clue about the big picture.

Do you doubt me?  Then read the mindless rubbish in the New York Times from all the administrative and journalistic cogs that sat there doing nothing in particular during the decline and fall of the Time Inc. machine.  What really upsets them was that, back in Time's heyday, Time women were all "researchers" and could never become "writers" and "reporters."

This is not disappointing; it is encouraging.

It means that the great administrative and bureaucratic structures are not the monolithic and all-powerful enforcers of the ruling class that we free spirits like to think.  No, indeed.  Their Barnacles and Stiltstockings are the dull and ponderous factotums of the ruling class, thinking more about their petty jealousies and perks – and above all, their pensions – than about the glorious vision of the party.

This explains, if you have ever wondered, the appetite of the Stalins and the Maos or the world for Great Purges and Proletarian Cultural Revolutions.  When you are a star-crazed revolutionary, nothing pisses you off so much as your supporters reposing on their benefices instead of getting off their butts and getting on with the revolution.

If you are wondering what on Earth the various players in Spy-on-Trump thought they were doing, the answer is simple.  They weren't thinking.  Not at all.  They were just cells in a bureaucratic organism responding to the various chemical stimuli in the blood.

More and more, I am coming to think we are doing a replay of the post-sixties experience.  Back then, liberals thought the world had changed forever and that they were going to be the future.  But ordinary Americans hated the rich-kid conceits of the hippies and the SDS, and so they started voting for Nixons and Reagans.  Well, the Kool Kidz got rid of Nixon, but I don't think they will manage to get rid of Trump.  And I can't wait to see what Reagan Mark II will be like.

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com.  Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.