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I feel like I’m in a restaurant where all the food is lousy and people are telling me to eat here or eat nothing. But I want something better and I’m not ashamed to sit here and demand it. I won’t vote Liberal or NDP to keep the Tories out for precisely the same reason I won’t vote Tory to keep the Liberals or NDP out: they don’t deserve power.

Holding your nose and voting for lesser evils doesn’t strike me as prudent

I could have fun shredding the social democratic parties’ platforms as unworkable collections of focus-grouped pandering points, or mock their instinctive faith in government. But my problem with them runs a great deal deeper. They believe reality is optional and faith can move mountains in secular matters.

When you tell them some policy will have undesirable consequences, they reply: not if we don’t want it to. Which sounds more like an attitude than an idea. But they really believe it. Tell them something has always failed in the past and they mock tradition as narrow and mean-spirited. Tell them incentives matter and they mock you as greedy and mean-spirited.

This approach contributes enormously more to the nastiness of political discussion than its self-canonized supporters grasp. Because they are convinced it’s good guys versus bad guys and they’re inherently good, they sanctimoniously demonize opponents as a matter of principle not tactics.

They also build castles in the air on principle. At least conservative politicians usually lie when they promise you the moon. But while left-wing parties make manifestly impossible promises and sometimes tell nose-stretchers about details, they sincerely believe that if they want it badly enough it will happen. As Robert Kennedy famously and fatuously said, don’t tell me the rules, tell me the problem. Including the rules of economics or geopolitics.