Stephen Harper must be a troglodyte. Why else was the media so anxiousto tell us how much he’d evolved? Clearly he’s some sort of lower lifeform trying to pass himself off as a human being. You only need to look athis politics to figure that out.

But how come this neo-conservative troglodyte ends up running the country?And what does that tell us about our so-called democracy?

Elections are supposed to be the showcase of democracy and we have had twoof them in less than two years, and yet it is laughable to imagine thatthese exercises have had anything to do with expressing the will of anenlightened voting public.

The images we typically associate with democracy are an assembly of citizensin ancient Greece (albeit minus its slavery and patriarchy) freely debatingthe issues of the day or else Frank Capra-type “little guys” standing up fortheir rights and refusing to be pushed around by the “big shots.”

But ourelections bear far less resemblance to these images than they do to the massmanipulation extravaganzas that Joseph Goebbels masterminded for the ThirdReich. Tens of millions of dollars are spent by an army of politicaloperatives and spin doctors with the willing collusion of the corporatemedia, all for the purpose of getting people to vote for what they don’twant. As for instance, governance by troglodyte.

There is a reason for this resemblance to Nazism becausein both cases we are dealing with the politics of the big lie. In our timethe big lie is that there is no alternative to capitalism. This is whatproduces the thousands of little lies that infest every aspect of politicallife and reduce democracy to a grotesque sham.

One not-so-little lie is the way a third-rate Liberal corruption scandal wasblown up out of all proportion in order to stampede public opinion intobacking Harper. You don’t have to be a Liberal supporter to see thesponsorship scandal as mostly hysterical hot air, not so very different fromthe way those troglodytes to the south, the Republican Party, whipped up amedia frenzy and nearly impeached an ex-President over a telltale cigar. Tothink of the party of Brian Mulroney posing as the upholder of moral virtueand “accountability” is an exercise in political hypocrisy that even aGoebbels would have admired.

But the plot gets thicker — and more sinister — when the RCMP enters thescene. It was the Mounties’ bombshell announcement that they were conductinga criminal investigation of the government over a possible leak from theFinance Ministry about the tax status of income trusts that was the turningpoint of the campaign, sideswiping the Liberals and putting the Tories inthe lead.

Yet to make such an announcement in the middle of an election — andespecially one where so much hysteria had been generated over governmentcorruption — was an unprecedented political intervention by the RCMP.According to The Globe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpson, as well-connected apundit as they come, normal procedure is for the Mounties to get on withtheir investigation without going public: “What the RCMP did wasinexplicable and quite wrong. Informed friends who know about RCMP practicesare baffled. They’ve never seen anything like it before.”

Actually thatisn’t quite true: to anyone familiar with RCMP history, this has the stenchof a dirty-tricks operation, presumably meant to favour the election of amore police-friendly government. In such a manner is the democratic will ofthe people forged.

Needless to say, there were lots of excellent reasons for turfing Liberals -the widening gulf between rich and poor, the unconscionable failure toeradicate child poverty, the undermining of medicare, the drumbeat ofmilitarism in Afghanistan and Haiti, the outsourcing of torture à la MaherArar and the undoubtedly covert collaboration with CIA “renditions,” thedeplorable record on Kyoto — and those are just the ones that come readilyto mind.

But most of this didn’t even register a tiny blip on the radarscreen of the election, for the obvious reason that the Tories want topursue these same policies even more aggressively than the Liberals. Whichis to say, this election was all about going from the frying pan into thefire.

Take crime, the other “hot button” issue in this campaign. Leave aside theimplicit prejudice that gives wall-to-wall media coverage to the shooting ofa sweet-faced, middle class white girl while routinely consigning thekilling of lower-class black teens to the back pages. Leave aside even theflagrant hypocrisy of “getting tough on guns” while pandering to the gunlobby by scrapping the gun registry. Let’s just focus on the most egregiouslie of all — that the gun violence in Toronto, as the chief troglodyte wouldhave it, “has nothing to do with social programs.”

In other words, it has nothing to do with more than a million kids living inpoverty or an unemployment rate among young blacks that is almost twice thatof non-blacks. It has nothing to do with the fact that Toronto has the widestgap in income disparity of any city in the country, where the richestfamilies make 27 times what the poorest families make. It has nothing to dowith the fact that the kids who are doing the shooting (and most of thedying) all grew up during the Mike Harris years, where pubic housing,welfare, education, youth and community services were all ripped to shredsto pay for the tax breaks that made the rich so much richer.

And the crowning touch is that Harris alumni Jim Flaherty and Tony Clementwill be joining Harper in Ottawa, so that they can victimize these kids allover again by imposing draconian mandatory prison sentences and locking up14 and 15-year-olds.

There’s an old one-liner that goes: You can have anything on the menu solong as it’s chicken. That’s the sort of democracy we have: You can havecapitalism in a Liberal red or Tory blue or NDP orange package, or if youcome from Quebec you can get it wrapped up in a fleur-de-lys, but it’salways more of the same misery. We live in an economic monoculture where noone dares question (in either official language) the sanctity of privateproperty, and so the only “diversity” you can have in politics is who’s moreinventive at lying. It’s a system designed for troglodytes to rise to thetop.

The NDP is no exception. In fact they play a crucial role in sustaining thecharade, in keeping alive the illusion that this sort of “democracy” works,that capitalism can be reformed … if only we could elect a few more NDPMPs. But if anything Jack Layton’s record in this last Parliament proves theopposite. First Layton backed the Liberals and used his moment in the sun toget $4 billion in extra social spending out of Martin. Then he veered theother way and voted with the Tories to bring Martin down. The upshot is thatwith the Tories now in power, much of that $4 billion — which is in any casea relative pittance in budgetary terms — will never see the light of day.

Layton’s inability to play an independent political role isn’t just a matterof parliamentary numbers: much more important is his total lack ofindependence from capitalism. Since the NDP is as committed as the otherparties to preserving the system, all they can differ on is how best to goabout doing it. Which is why Layton is condemned to always be looking forsome “big boy” to do a deal with.

His policies in the campaign reflected that underlying reality. By concedingthe supposed legitimacy of private medical clinics, he has made it that mucheasier for the Tories to do a demolition job on medicare, since Harper cannow claim that even the “socialists” accept the principle of privatedelivery of medical services. On crime, Layton’s position was in fact morereactionary than the Liberals, as he tried to outdo Harper’s law-and-orderrhetoric by calling for longer mandatory sentences for gun crimes than theTories and for locking up 16-year-olds! And from supporting the chauvinistClarity Act to Bay Street-style “fiscal responsibility” to maintaining thedefense budget, Layton’s positions were virtually indistinguishable from theother parties.

But perhaps the most insidious role of the NDP, especially given theirreligious devotion to parliamentary democracy, was their facilitatingof the RCMP’s intervention in the election. The bombshell about the incometrust investigation was contained in a letter from the Mounties’Commissioner Guiliano Zaccardelli to NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis, who hadwritten him demanding a probe. In choosing to go public with that letter,the NDP did two things: they handed the election lead to Harper and theygave the RCMP “plausible deniability” to any charges that they were meddlingin the election, since after all it wasn’t them but the NDP which hadreleased the news.

Any politically literate person could have foreseen theseconsequences, so the only reasonable conclusion is that the NDP was awilling party to this scam, presumably because they saw in it the chance fora few more seats for themselves.

In a recent column The Globe and Mail‘s Rick Salutin recalled a not sodissimilar role that the venerable Ed Broadbent played in the 1988 election,helping tip the balance in Mulroney’s favour against John Turner. Accordingto Salutin, Broadbent “got what looked a lot like a reward when BrianMulroney appointed him head of a new human-rights body, for which hetravelled the world in the years after he resigned as leader.” Which makesyou wonder whether Layton doesn’t have a stay at Rideau Hall or a job assome UN functionary in his future, courtesy of Harper. After all,troglodytes take care of their own.

We don’t have a democracy but an elaborate counterfeit, and until we have amass political movement that puts socialism back on the agenda, that isn’tgoing to change.