"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." "If a battle cannot be won, do not fight it." These two great truths (wrongly attributed respectively to Edmund Burke and Sun Tzu) encapsulate the dilemma of whether we should engage with bourgeois politics.

Better men than me have thought we shouldn't. "When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither" wrote Alasdair MacIntyre of the 2004 US presidential election. This, he continued, is because the competing candidates narrowed down debate to exclude important, attractive, alternative viewpoints.

Which is exactly what we have in UK politics now. Many important questions are off the agenda such as: can we use tools beyond macroeconomic policy to reallocate resources towards housebuilding, decarbonization, social care and so on? How can we economize on the scarcity of management ability? Does inequality impede productivity growth? Might the UK's poor economic performance be due to fundamental forces within capitalism? How can we improve the public sphere to facilitate better policy-making? Is there a case for greater economic democracy? Etc, etc.

It's not just specific policy agendas that are excluded from mainstream politics. So too are entire viewpoints, and not just Marxian ones. Where would a cool-headed Oakeshottian sceptic find a political home? Where would a Hayekian wary of top-down management do so? Or someone wanting to combine competitive markets with equality? And how can someone who values freedom support parties that concern themselves with which toilets people use or what women wear?

Instead, three of our main parties seem to be pandering only to a small subset of voters: older social conservatives who still support Brexit, are obsessed with immigration and want a return to the 1950s with national service, metal-bashing and coal-mining. (Though, strangely, they don't want the income tax rates of that period.)

The standard objection to all this is that we should hold our noses and support the lesser of two (or three or four) evils. That's just what many of us did last year. But there are problems with this.

One is that those demanding that we do so don't return the favour: those centrists who urged leftists to suppress their doubts and vote Labour last year weren't so enthusiastic about supporting the party in 2019*, preferring to whine about being politically homeless.

Another is that our vote was (deliberately) misinterpreted. It was taken not as a mandate to reject the Tory party and all that it stood for, but rather as a reason to kow-tow to Reform 2025 Ltd.

And thirdly, voting legitimates an illegitimate system - one that not only gravely restricts cognitive diversity but which gives weight to nasty or ill-informed preferences; which insults our intelligence with drivel about "maxing out the credit card" and there being "not a huge amount of money"; and which, in giving undue weight to the power of the rich, is a debased form of pseudo-democracy.

On top of all this, politicians - merely by being politicians - have a distorted worldview. Even the best of them tend to be overconfident about the potential for top-down policies to change a complex society; to under-rate the value of emergence (via either markets or economic democracy); and to overvalue hard work.

Of course, voting is not the only form of political expression. There's also protest.

But there's a simple problem here: protests don't work - not only by failing to influence governments but also by often reducing public support for their cause. Anti-war protestors might be just as correct today as they were in 2003 - and they are just as impotent**. Protesting is more a form of self-expression than a means of forcing change, a
futile gesture. And there are many other forms of self-expression - music, needlework, writing and so on - that are better for one's mental health.

Yes, mental health. Engagement with politics makes us miserable, frustrated and angry that politicians are so stupid, nasty and limited in their worldview. We've academic research to support this. Whilst most forms of volunteering make people happier - because they have a purpose in life and get to meet others - Stephan Humpert has shown that political activity actually worsens life satisfaction. One of the many good things I did on retiring was to switch from Radio 4 to Radio 3 which is gloriously unpolluted by news between 8.30am and 1pm. Let us cultivate our garden.

But, but, but. There are arguments to the contrary.

One is that, as Terence said, "I am man, and nothing that is human is indifferent to me." Some of us take an interest in politics because it is a branch of interesting subjects - social science, psychology and, increasingly, psychiatry - in a similar way to how zoologists might study baboons.

Many of you might add that we have a public duty to engage in politics. Such claims are often bad faith. I've not been deafened by centrists urging we Marxists to be more politically active. Quite the opposite: the goal of the McSweeneyite tendency in the Labour party seems to be to silence the left.

And herein is a reason for us to be active. Our silence means that politics will remain dominated by know-nothings and cranks hostile to fundamental questions of how to build a more prosperous and freer country. Good collective decision-making requires there to be cognitive diversity. And in exiting the public sphere we further diminish the albeit slight hope of ever attaining such diversity.

Nor will our inactivity be interpreted properly. The political class (of which the legacy media is part) will see it as apathy and not what it really is - which is contempt.

And engagement can bring with it power. Why has pensioner poverty fallen so much this century whilst housing has become unaffordable for younger people? Is it really nothing to do with the fact that pensioners are more likely to vote than younger folk?

But there's something stronger. Whilst disengagement is an easy option for affluent older people like me (and Farage) it is not so for others. Post-2010 austerity policies killed tens of thousands of people. That's many more than could be saved by charity and voluntary work. Even if political action can't build a much better society, it could save us from a much worse one.

Perhaps very much worse. In the US there is a very real threat of the country descending into fascism. That's something to be resisted by any means necessary, the only issue being how most effectively to do so.

And there's the rub. Even if MacIntyre was wrong to advocate withdrawal from bourgeois politics, he was correct - and wrongly ignored - on another point. At the end of After Virtue, he urged the construction of new forms of community "within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages." To put it into more economic and political language, we need vehicles for collective action - be they environmental groups, stronger unions or consumer advocacy organizations to be a counterweight to captured regulators. This side of electoral reform, these probably shouldn't consist of a new party. But they should include groups capable of putting not just intellectual but also political and financial influence upon the political class.

* Perhaps because they didn't regard a corrupt clueless buffoon who wanted to cut us off from Europe as the lesser evil compared to mild social democracy.

** Not all protests fail, though. The poll tax protests of 1990 did force a change of policy. Whether this was because they were correct and powerful, or because financial markets took fright at the sight of riots in Trafalgar Square, is however unclear to me.