Ever since the wheels fell off of neoliberalism in 2008 and Barack Obama clinched the presidency, the West has grown increasingly dissatisfied with the way of the world—nowhere more than in the world’s richest nation. From Occupy and Bernie Sanders to the Tea Party and Donald Trump, many Americans across the political spectrum have called for a revolution. But few have tried to start one, and those who did failed miserably. There are deep-seated reasons for this, and they don’t augur poorly for the burgeoning Trump resistance.

For a long time, unlike in the Arab world or Ukraine, the western status quo appeared to be unshakeable. But then 2016 happened, which, after the twin political cataclysms of Brexit and Trump, would be described as “a year of big political revolutions” by Brexiter-in-chief, Nigel Farage. But this wasn’t so much a revolution as a restructuring of the political order, a transfer of power from one elite to another, rather than the sort of bottom-up popular uprising that many would-be revolutionaries had in mind. The faces changed, but the system itself remained very much the same.

Again, this would appear to suggest that modern western power structures are impervious to the storming-of-the-Bastille revolts that dominate high school history lessons, but as we’ve seen over the past few weeks, Trump’s inauguration and his subsequent use of executive orders with tyrannical abandon have spurred a long-dormant spirit of activism into action. Marches and protests have swarmed America’s cities and airports, inspired similar demonstrations globally, and even digital activism has notched victories. The snowflakes, it seems, have whipped up a snowstorm.

While this is all encouraging, there’s little reason to be hopeful. The Iraq war protests in 2003 were the last show of dissent of this scale, and although it was impressive, the public fury was ultimately ignored and accomplished nothing. Two years earlier, George W. Bush’s inauguration had drawn a similar response and a comparable legal challenge, and we know how that ended. Since the end of the civil rights movement, political activism in the West has had a long record of impotency. There’s a reason for this: Few of us have any idea what a revolution looks like, or what it takes to achieve one.

For most of us, “revolution” is an abstract term that we understand in theory, but not in practice. After many decades of relative stability in the West, our sole point of contact with furious political upheaval has been from the safe distance of a news report. But this detachment distorts the reality of political change and propagates an overly neat narrative that has little to do with the truth.