There's a lot of cosplay in politics, like the Twitter social-justice guerrillas angrily insisting that we must take radical action before they check in to their jobs as, well, university professors. But the Transylvanian point is the right one. It's a view of politics as literally code, not as a titanic clash among social forces: if you say these formulas, then you will get what you want.

The cynicism of the other side has a certain kind of grifty honesty about it, but it is also a failure of imagination or an overly careerist view of politics. That said, well, if someone were paying me millions of dollars to make Mueller memes, would I really resist?