What a time-wasting farce this has all been. Robert Mueller’s confused, lethargic testimony before Congress this week confirmed how foolish Democrats have been to hope Mueller would “bring down” Donald Trump. For years, people have hoped that Mueller would swoop in like a “deus ex machina” with blockbuster charges against the president. For years, it has also been obvious that this would not happen, and that defeating Trump would require the traditional hard work of political organizing. Now that Mueller has conclusively showed that the Russia investigation was a pitiful sideshow, perhaps Democrats can finally get back to the issues that Americans actually care about.

It’s embarrassing to recall just how absurdly some people elevated Mueller, and how much faith was placed in him. Memes compared Mueller to Superman, or portrayed him as a top cop who was secretly fitting Trump for an orange jumpsuit. He appeared on votive candles and earrings. SNL sang him a Christmas carol. There was an action figure.

But faith in Mueller was born of desperation. He was an ageing Republican bureaucrat, with no track record of seriously challenging people in power. He had been an apologist for the Iraq war and mass surveillance, and a reliable servant of the DC establishment. It took a great deal of wishful thinking to envision Mueller as a caped crusader. Looking back, it’s quite obvious that people were simply seeing something that wasn’t there: “Mueller projects a pragmatism – a political strain of normcore … that has come to suggest … a veiled promise: that shady facts will find their light.” There was no such promise, veiled or otherwise. Like the idea that Barack Obama harbored a secret radical socialist deep within, this was simply imaginative fancy. Mueller was a cautious centrist through and through.

The Mueller report itself reflected this ideological temperament. While Donald Trump was wrong to say that it completely exonerated the president of wrongdoing, it did not accuse him of criminal misconduct. The report was clear that it “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” and “did not make any determination with regard to culpability in any way”. It’s true that Mueller’s report “didn’t exonerate” Trump. But nor did it offer the kind of bombshell revelations that could be used to shift public opinion in the direction of impeachment.

Ultimately, most people seem to have shrugged it off. Polling shows most people are against impeaching Trump, and even Nancy Pelosi seems to recognize that the issue isn’t a political winner. Mueller’s weak testimony before Congress only made the pro-impeachment case harder. Those who thought Trump could be destroyed through law enforcement needed their heroic law enforcer to agree with them. He made it plain that he doesn’t.

It was always a mistake to put the Russia investigation at the center of critiques of Trump. It’s true that having a foreign government nudge American elections is disturbing – though this country isn’t really in a position to give lectures on the importance of electoral integrity – and that presidents shouldn’t be allowed to get away with impeding federal investigations into their conduct.

But Democrats complaining about Russian interference have always seemed like “sore losers”. Instead of grappling with the very serious reasons why working-class people of all races are disillusioned with the Democratic party, prominent figures focus on litigating the various ways in which they were robbed of their rightful prize.

In many ways, the Democratic obsession with the Mueller investigation was symptomatic of a party that has lost touch with the real concerns of working people. People are upset because they’re drowning in debt, their rent is too damn high, they can’t afford their health insurance and they are working crappy jobs.

In polls, their top issues are the economy, education and healthcare. Democrats have failed for decades to confront social and economic problems – look at the homelessness crises in “deep blue” cities like New York and San Francisco. As Thomas Frank has pointed out, the “party of the people” has become a party of Wall Street, unwilling to contemplate policies that threaten the interests of the wealthy. They have done nothing to expand union membership, nothing to fight austerity. Instead, Democrats grovel to exploitative megacorporations like Amazon and wave away difficult issues like climate change that require seriously challenging corporate power. Until they honestly reckon with their own weaknesses as a party, the Democrats aren’t going to get the public behind them.

The Russia scandal was the fruit of a badly flawed political ideology. It is a kind of West Wing view of political power that believes change happens behind closed doors in Washington, rather than as the result of mass mobilization. You don’t need to go out and convince new voters to join your party, or offer them a clear policy agenda. Instead, smart, highly credentialed lawyers will save the day. And Donald Trump didn’t win because he tapped in to an authentic popular anger that needs to be addressed, but because dastardly foreign agents rigged the game.

After Mueller’s testimony, hopefully we can put this pathetic chapter in American politics behind us. The Democratic party should realize that the things that matter most in politics are the ones that affect people most directly: climate change, war, economic deprivation. Is it outrageous that governments subvert each other’s democracies, and that our president is deceitful and corrupt? You bet it is. But every moment spent talking about one issue is time not spent talking about the others, and the years wasted on the Mueller investigation should have been spent emphasizing the harm Trump is doing to ordinary people’s lives, and explaining how the Democrats intend to do better.