I can, with some confidence, tell you who represents the majority of people in this week's elections. No one. Most people will not vote. For all the headlines and hoo-ha of the political/media class, the big story is not Ukip and whether Farage worships Satan in a smoking jacket. The real issue is that people neither know what they are supposed to be voting for, nor see any point in doing so.

The rise of Ukip, gaffe-heavy and policy-free, is but a symptom of this wider malaise. As a protest, people are prepared to vote in MEPs who won't turn up and seek to demolish the institution within which they are meant to represent us. A strange double bluff is happening here that outfoxes the so-called democratic deficit.

It is happening for two reasons. Firstly, the political/media class knows that there is a problem but scarcely acknowledges it, continuing to centre mainly on Westminster and on processes mysterious to most people (who is your MEP? What does he or she do all day?). Secondly, since the crash, distrust has massively inflated. This is happening right across Europe, where Eurosceptic parties will be voted in on turnouts of less than 40%. UK turnout is predicted to be about 36%. Each of these parties promises to shield its voters from the effects of globalisation, job losses and other changes in communities that are routinely blamed on immigration. These parties range from the out-and-out fascists of Golden Dawn in Greece, who openly admire Hitler, to Hungary's ultra-nationalist Jobbik to France's "sanitised" Front National, which is expected to do very well and align itself with the Netherlands' Islamophobic Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders.

That the right should rise in a recession, and at a time when democracy feels so broken, is not a shock. What is dispiriting is how slow the political establishment has been to react to this. It's almost as if Ukip didn't exist until six weeks ago. Screaming "racist" at its members, usually via Twitter, hasn't really worked as a strategy. It has simply further embedded already alienated people who may well be racist in some of their views, but not in all of them. It further embeds racism as an individual property rather than the institutional structure in which all of us operate, all the time.

Some on the left are consoling themselves with a hint of green. It's a bit like that fashion for paint that was basically white, but had some subtle shade in it that most people could barely detect. Others are saying that Farage has peaked, which may well be so. (His voters are the group most likely to peg it, with many over 70 years old.) Whatever he says in his wall-to-wall interviews, it is highly unlikely his party will win the 20 or so seats he would need to hold any balance of power. For Farage this is probably as good as it gets. Then there are those still waiting for Ed Miliband to rise like the Iron Giant and make it all better. It feels like Waiting for Godot.

For all the alienated folk who are clinging to the wreckage of Ukip, the majority simply can't be arsed. This has been the political reality for a long time, and one that we remain in absolute denial about. Apathy does not explain the anger and ennui that existed across Europe long before Russell Brand had his big revolutionary idea of not voting. He gave voice to the pre-existing disconnect and is now making a bizarre series of YouTube clips featuring truth-tellers with exceedingly odd notions of the truth.

Meanwhile, Farage is hoovering up support from people who feel that no one speaks for them. He has used the media so effectively, precisely because, instead of seeing him as an insurgent, they understand both his message and his method to be traditional. He is absolutely part of the establishment, a character who does not want to change the system but to shrink it into a manageable enterprise.

If he were to align with other rightwing parties in Europe, he would be more dangerous but that is far too "European" for him. Nonetheless, he has pushed political discourse to the right just as many social attitudes shift to the left. Our institutions so often lag behind our culture and this applies to Westminster, with its archaic and shameful carrying-on, most of all. Right now we have a ghost parliament: our elected representatives have given themselves an extra week's holiday.

The culture wars that happen between liberals and conservatives continue to occur largely outside of the arena that is deemed "politics". Yet politics continues to be reported as supreme. Economics and culture are spoken of as side issues rather than things that determine the way we live.

The supremacy of Westminster and its lackeys, however, is surely challenged by such low voter turnout. How low does it have to be before we say that these people do not have any kind of mandate?

The cracks are showing, the crackpots are gathering and the customary blather about compulsory voting will not do. Farage is but another politician who is promising to control things beyond his control. The tectonic plates are shifting underneath the political class. Ukip is not a quake but a tremor. The real collapse is happening in the democratic structures we used to believe held us together. We are rooting in the rubble.