There’s a line in a Tom Waits song that goes, “Two dead-ends and you’vestill got to choose.” In the federal election you got three or four choices,but they were still all dead-ends.

I chose not to vote. Not out of apathy but out of conviction. I take mypolitics seriously, which is why I refuse to buy into the sham democracy ofelectoral politics. It would be an exaggeration to say that the choices inthis election were between a crook, a fascist and a fraud. An exaggeration — but not by all that much.

It’s always the same, always an exercise in choosing the “lesser of two (orthree) evils.” But if evil is all there is on offer, then evil is all youend up with. The road to hell is paved with “lesser” evils.

The same goes for strategic voting. You don’t vote for a party anymore,since no one believes their promises anyway. Now the only reason to vote isto keep the other bastards out. What sort of democracy is that?

To say nothing of the fact that as a “strategy” it is completelyself-defeating. All it ever means in concrete terms is — vote Liberal to“stop the right.” And then the Liberals come back in and do what the Tories or Reform/Alliance would have done.

That Paul Martin can still pass himself off as a “progressive” alternativeto the Conservatives is laughable. This is the man who brought in thebiggest budget cuts and corporate tax cuts in Canadian history. To saynothing of being a corporate robber baron in his own right. This is liketrusting one gangster to protect you from another.

Yes, I know the Liberals are better on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. I don’t underestimate the damage and suffering that Stephen Harper’sright-wing yahoos can cause once they get into power. But these issues don’texist in isolation.

We have a society where inequality is rampant, where the gulf between richand poor has never been wider. All the mainstream parties are responsiblefor that; whatever the differences in their rhetoric, they’ve all pursuedneo-liberal policies when in power. You can’t sustain little pockets ofdemocratic rights in a social fabric being ripped apart like this.Neo-liberal economics inevitably leads to neo-liberal politics, i.e. to theever more ruthless exercise of corporate power where no one’s rights aresafe.

As for Jack Layton, there was a basic phoniness in his politics, as in hissmile. He claimed to be offering a “positive choice” but even before theelection he was openly angling for a deal with the Liberals. This meantthat voting NDP amounted to a vote to keep the Liberals in power. No wonderthat a lot of potential NDP voters opted in the end just to vote for theLiberals directly.

There was also big streak of nostalgia in the NDP campaign. We were supposedto believe that if the party had enough leverage in a minority parliament,then we’d be back to the good old days of the early seventies when the lastLiberal-NDP coalition produced some progressive legislation.

But nostalgia in politics is often the stuff of pipedreams. A lot hashappened in 30 years — above all the onset of globalization and a bigshift to the right in mainstream politics. The room for reforms within capitalism has all but vanished.

You can see this when parties a lot more radical than the NDP come to power,like the Greens in Germany or Lula da Silva and his Workers’ Party inBrazil. Their reform agendas almost immediately give way to “responsible”policies, i.e. ones that perpetuate the power of the corporate elite.

If Bob Rae, who had his own majority in Ontario, was so beholden tocorporate interests that he couldn’t bring in as minor a reform as publicauto insurance, then there is even less reason to suppose that aMartin-Layton alliance is going to make any meaningful changes.

(Some radical left groups were calling for a “critical vote” for the NDP.Personally I found this more confusing than enlightening. What were yousupposed to do — scowl furiously as you marked your ballot?)

As it turned out, my choice not to vote got more support than any of thepolitical parties. Despite the intensity of the campaign and a lot ofhand-wringing in the media about declining voter turnout, the abstentionrate this time hit a new high of 40 per cent. Clearly, there is a deep andabiding alienation from mainstream politics. Is this such a bad thing?

To my mind, the real puzzle isn’t why people aren’t voting but rather why so many people still bother to vote at all.

I can understand why the rich and the comfortable middle class still vote — it’s their system and they want to protect their stake in it. But what aboutall the rest of us — the poor and the insecure? What stake do we have inthis system and what exactly are we voting to protect?

In theory an election is supposed to be a serious exercise of judgment. Thisis when “the voter,” a mythical beast of the same species as “the taxpayer”or “the average citizen,” makes his/her appearance. “The voter” is supposedto deliberate on the contending party programs and then render a verdict onelection day which sends “a message” to the politicians, who then claim a“mandate” for their policies on that basis.

But reality looks nothing like this charade. The election campaigns, thesaturation media coverage — it’s all designed to hoodwink and stampede thepublic. What you get in the voting booths isn’t some carefully formedpolitical judgment. More often than not voting is based on misinformation,prejudice or fear. Or else there is what the pundits call “brand namerecognition” — people vote for the brand they know. You “buy” a governmentlike you buy a fridge — and you don’t even get a warranty.

Capitalism always claims to “give the people what they want” but what it’sreally about is making people want what capitalism has to give. It’s thesame with politics: elections aren’t about giving people power but abouttaking it away, ceding it to one or another brand-name corporate politicalhuckster who gets to run our lives for the next few years.

The crucial question isn’t who do you vote for but what sort of world do youwant? Without social justice, democracy is nothing but a hollow shell.Homelessness, child poverty, the chasm between the fabulously wealthy andthe working poor — this is the real “democratic deficit.” Until we addressthat, our democracy doesn’t amount to much more than a three-card monte con game.