Whatever happened to the Venezuelan revolution? Two weeks ago, we were assured by the media it was all over, bar the shouting. Television showed crowds controlling the streets of Caracas. A plane was on the tarmac and the decrepit regime of Nicolás Maduro was finished. He could not possibly survive, with his country in economic meltdown and only distant Russia on his side.

I know Venezuela and have watched its tragic decline heartbroken. I can only assume that Maduro’s opponent, Juan Guaidó, miscalculated. The expectation was that he had infiltrated the army and plotted a coup. Helpful American agents would have offered inducements, to outbid unhelpful Russians.

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Clearly this assumption was wrong. The Americans blew it. The army held fast to the security and privileges of power. The opposition was forced to retreat and lick its wounds, while delegates have retreated to that home of lost causes, Oslo, for “talks”.

The greatest of historical fallacies is to confuse crowds with power. Venezuela has disappeared from the headlines, because its headlines were about crowds, not about the realities of power. The trouble with crowds is that, sooner or later, they go home. The Arab spring of 2011 was about what took place in the streets of various capital cities. Crowds were reputedly drawn by the much-vaunted rallying cry of social media, but they dissolved in many places into nothingness.

Tiananmen Square did not bring down the Chinese regime in 1989. Millions of Egyptians converging on Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2013 merely won more dictatorship. Istanbul’s Taksim Square crowds in 2013 did not depose President Erdoğan; quite the opposite. Riots in Tehran did not spell the end for Iran’s ayatollahs in 2017.

Mercifully, power in a democracy emanates from the ballot box. Probably the biggest crowd in London’s history, against the Iraq war of 2003, had zero impact on the elected government of Tony Blair. Today, no remain rally can reverse the 2016 referendum, just as no leave rally is entitled to claim crowd authority for a no-deal Brexit. That is the problem with crowds. They don’t do subtlety.

But in the absence of the ballot, there is only the gun. At the start of the French revolution in 1789, Louis XVI summoned his army to Paris, but was persuaded by a commander not to deploy it against the mob. That advice, said Antoine de Rivarol at the time, “is not one of the causes of the revolution, it is the revolution”.

Likewise today, the assiduous demonstrators on the streets of Khartoum are still waiting to see in which direction Sudan’s guns are turning. Armies are perfectly able to turn against rulers, but rarely to the advantage of democracy.

We warm instinctively to crowds. They offer comfort and reassurance to us in our opinions. They mobilise emotion among the like-minded, and smother argument in fellow feeling. We sometimes forget that crowds can cut two ways. They can also be harnessed as an aid to leadership, as by the fascist movement, or as rabble to be suppressed as a totem of power. Maduro was able to stage an apparently sizeable rally in his own support.

Ever since reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets I have been intrigued by the role of crowds in politics. As I watched last month’s Extinction Rebellion assemble in Hyde Park, I tentatively asked a painted warrior if her slogan was not a bit over the top. She banged her drum in my face and pointed to a child with a sign reading “Save my planet”. It was pure Ehrenreich, the masks and costumes of the “ecstatic revolution … stepping out of our assigned roles and statuses, of gender, ethnicity, tribe and rank, into a brief utopia of egalitarianism and mutual love”. It was politics as carnival, and don’t ask questions.

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Various pundits thought, a decade ago, that this sort of public participation would disappear in the age of the internet. They were wrong. As we saw in the Arab spring and since, the internet merely fuelled its antithesis, a craving for human congregation, for a crowd. The internet also fooled its addicts into thinking that social media was numerical power, the final realisation of Trotsky’s crowd as “the backbone of the revolution”. Two billion Facebook users must surely outrank Donald Trump. But they do not. They are just two billion Facebook users. A traffic jam on the M25 is not power.

I believe that where the crowd can be most effective is when deployed tactically against a specific, winnable goal. In the climate change argument, local crowds in the north of England have all but stopped fracking. Anti-GM food campaigners won their war in Europe. Demonstrators against the Sackler family in New York are wrecking its reputation and cutting arts funding. Where power is shamed by publicity, it can concede ground without too much inconvenience. I would love to be a “crowd consultant”.

People take to the streets for diverse reasons: for group bonding; to express grievance and frustration; to signal virtue; or as Ehrenreich says of the hippy movement, to “hold hands with strangers and demonstrate collective joy”. But in a democracy a political crowd cannot outbid the ballot. It is an attempt to bully argument by strength of numbers. As such, it relies on publicity and on its appeal to the media. But it forgets that the media is the crowd. When the parade passes on, it too packs its bags and goes home.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist