So let’s recap … two months ago, several key factional (actually small, state-based gangs, formed, like the big C, around the most powerfully malignant cell)  leaders in the ALP organised the deposition of a sitting Prime Minister who had beaten John Howard, because a series of polls suggested that their primary vote was too low to guarantee victory, especially in key outer-suburban seats.

The sub-factional heavies acted swiftly, at least in part, to head off News Ltd’s obvious destabilisation campaign spruiking Julia Gillard — even though said heavies may have been leaking stuff to the papers to aid this campaign, because Kevin Rudd swore at them.

Having replaced the leader of the country in a few hours of meetings in offices away from the public gaze, said heavies then went immediately into an election based on a selling point of stability through incumbency, made an obvious lie about their capitulation to the mining industry, then having failed to go on the offensive and put the Coalition on the back foot over WorkChoices, opposing the stimulus, and hungrily eyeing a carve-up of Medicare, spent the first two weeks losing ground to the Coalition, proposing disconnected gimmicks such as the citizens assembly on climate change (remember that? A week is a long time in politics) and then relaunching her campaign by saying that the real her hadn’t even been present since the poll was called.

Now a fortnight later, with Tony Abbott having survived an appearance on Red Faces, an off-colour “no doesn’t mean no” reference, the leader of the Opposition is appearing next to so many babies that if he opened a petting zoo, the dingo standing beside him would have one in its mouth, and simultaneously selling a combination of the Pacific solution “from day one”, scaling back the stimulus without creating unemployment, and pushing a business-tax funded parental leave plan of near-Scandinavian generosity while rolling back the nanny state.

At this point, Abbott refused to accept the challenge by Gillard of a second debate that she’d earlier refused to have, while the factional heavies got Kevin Rudd (a character killed off in an earlier chapter) back in to save the election, while simultaneously sorting out the numbers to decide the next leader of the Opposition.

The fake Andrew Bolt, who does a satire blog in the Herald Sun, threatened legal action against the real Andrew Bolt, a twitterer, and, as far as I can tell, then removed that entry from his blog, after 30 “Andrew Bolt” twitter accounts flowered in a day. Then chorus of horror at what a vacuous anti-election this had become was then joined by of all people Paul Kelly saying — Paul effin Kelly saying — that the politics of the major parties were too sameish and devoid of ideas. Finally, Tony Abbott launched the Coalition campaign by claiming that having a family made you a conservative.

Have I got that right? I mean have I got that right? Cos I don’t know how the election looks from over there, but from over here — at a cafe in the shadow of Seville Cathedral, admiring the Islamic tile work on the walls of the Alcazar palace, while sharing a half-bottle of amontillado with a young woman who has never seen Andalusia before — it looks like sh-t. Beyond sh-t. Meta-sh-t.

M’esteemed colleague Dr Bahnisch asked why, given so many people think this election is boring, what with all the hi-jinks and pile in of ex-PMs (what a pity Billy McMahon couldn’t be persuaded to say a few words. Could son Julian McMahon be persuaded to deputise in his place? Again?). The answer is because boredom arises not from a lack of activity, but from a lack of meaningful activity.

This election is boring in the way other people’s recounted dreams are boring — because the disconnect between a genuine public political process, and what is going on now, is so total that anything can now follow from anything, and none of it presents a real case about how we should organise things, how we should live our lives, which is what politics is meant to be about.

How the hell did it get to this point? A point where everyone is throwing up their hands in exasperation at a farcical, self-parodic process, while simultaneously serving it at every moment? Was it the Labor Party? The factional leaders? The sub-factional sub-leaders? The media? The system? The establishment? The man? That woman? Or, as m’colleague Keane suggests, youse*?

The answer, I think, is all of these and more, except youse, in some strict sense. From multiple separate sources, Australian democracy is in a pretty low state, but much of the breast-beating is a ritualised way of offering obeisance while continuing with business as usual, and short on analysis. It might be worth looking at the array of forces with a little more dispassion.

Australia entered this election campaign after the dumping of a centre-right Labor leader, busy applying a series of reforms in a fairly elitist, managerial top-down way. The reforms were overwhelmingly directed to tackling the increasing inequality that has become entrenched in Australia over past decades, and the systemic shift of public to private share of the economy. The Opposition that faced that government had been divided along moderate/hard-right lines burning through three leaders before hitting someone whom many in the party saw as a slightly demented religious neurotic.

Prompted by bad polling, by destabilising reports of leadership contention, the factional leaders replaced the Prime Minister without a vote — and then went to an election with nothing. Zip. Bupkis. No narrative, no argument, no story to tell, nothing to project — save, of course, for the incumbency of a Prime Minister in the job for a month. The gap allowed the Opposition — which had no story, and less than a full slate of candidates — to cobble one together, and go on the attack, with some success.

Labor responded with a series of disconnected initiatives that I hope to God were conceived in panic, because if they were planned then Labor is barely competent to drool. The press, led by a near-psychotically biased News Ltd stable fastened on these marginal pitches like cats playing with a bottle-top mobile, when they weren’t obsessing on Rudd, rivalry, and earlobes, at which point they were like dogs truffling their own scrotes.

This bedlam is surrounded by a wider funk among the general public — a mix of dissatisfaction without an object, fear of specific groups, a desire for real action on some things such as climate change, with a simultaneous wariness of larger schemes, or anything out of the order of things, such as a financial stimulus.

Institutionally, there is a comprehensive split between Australian political institutions and the more or less autonomous way they reproduce — two major parties, supported by taxpayers and exhaustive preferential voting, undergirded by compulsory voting — on the one hand, and the general public on the other. Living in an increasingly atomised society with a paucity of intermediary institutions that connect people to politics, they have more of a jaundiced attitude to politicians as a class than just about anywhere in the Western world, while the political class return the favour with a contemptuous attitude to them as a focus-grouped perennially polled lumpen-sample-tariat.

Bad political systems can be overcome by passionate parties representing a public will, in the absence of a pluralist and active debate; and a society with a public connected to a vigorous pluralist debate can overcome sclerotic parties.

Australia is in the invidious position of having all three — atomised social life is intersecting with a shallow and unreflective mainstream media (where it is not so biased and disinformational as to be malign), and both are intersecting with a set of political structures designed in the 1920s to set up both major parties as quasi-state apparatuses.

Given that the process is a circle, one can start anywhere. But let’s start with the parties. There’s no real mystery as to why the only group that is operating like a genuine party is the Greens — with a large and active membership, a clear philosophy that generates a program with a meaningful set of priorities. Labor and Liberal used to be like that too. How did they drift away from anything resembling a core philosophy?

For the Liberals, it was external factors — the Cold War held a contradictory philosophy of liberalism and conservatism together. As post-Cold War, globalised neoliberalism started in earnest, John Howard evolved a reasonably sophisticated version of this — a state-enforced social conservatism was necessary precisely because the forces of capitalism being unleashed were so atomising. The contradiction was the selling point. The trouble with this formula is that it doesn’t work for long, because the process just keeps on going — the GFC, climate change, cultural shifts.

A liberal-conservative party in this period really needs to rethink what its position is on how the market interacts with wider social life. It hasn’t done that so instead it offers a grab-bag-chest-thumping xenophobia on boats, Swedish-style parental leave mixed with commitments to tax cuts and surplus. It doesn’t begin to make sense. But it just needs to give the impression that it can all be held together.

Labor has a different problem. It abandoned its role of having a critical relationship to social process in the 1970s, and saw itself as managing the independent process of capitalism with a bit of re-direction in the Hawke/Keating years. What exchange there was between a wider world of ideas and programs (as opposed to mere policies) began to fall away in that period.

This was the worst possible time for that to happen, not because of Labor’s failures, but because of its success. Having established itself a century earlier to achieve, among other things, a certain standard of living, it had to a degree by the 1990s achieved that, albeit in a fairly limited partial way. Unable to push those gains further as a majority program (creating Medibank/Medicare in the ’70s/’80s was for all Australians, helping the long-term unemployed uses the taxes of the minority for a majority), it simply stopped thinking about what a new and more expansive majority program might be.

Having embraced the essentially anti-humanist ideal of neoliberalism — that people are nothing other than homo economicus — it lost touch with the more expansive ideal that undergirds any progressive party, the ideal that people are more than a labour supply, a working class, a consumer group, whatever.

Had it retained that idea, Labor would have been talking more aggressively for years now, about quality of life in an expanded sense — in terms of a more flexible and varied relationship to work, of a wider variety of housing options, of transformed cities and the like. It would have presented Abbott’s parental leave scheme as its own years ago, and with a more expanded remit of leave and care options. It would be in the business of changing what Australians think of as what falls under the scope of being changeable, transformable, improvable.

The licensed cynics on the Right could argue that this is “elitist”. The plain fact is that progressive parties are always in the position of being “elitist”, if by that we mean challenging their own base and the wider population to want a better sort of life in ways that cannot be achieved through the cash nexus. It challenges people to be dissatisfied with things as they are, to reconceptualise them as changeable, and to aim for more.

Within the Labor Party, the Right tend to snort with contempt whenever any such suggestions are made. But quite aside from the actual point itself of making life better, there is the political point . When Labor stops doing this, when it stops taking on the big challenges, when it stops talking about society, life, etc, as projects to be grasped whole — then it simply runs out of things to talk about.

With the exception of the brief interregnum of Mark Latham — who genuinely did have transformative ideas despite his manifold faults now flagrantly on display — Labor has had zero ideas for a decade, to such a degree that Kevin Rudd’s very mild program looked like the Great Leap Forward by comparison. And that’s the point we have reached — where every morning Labor hacks pull micro-policies out of their a-se, along with the gruffnuts, to placate nine Hillsongers in Gunnamatta.

Why such a failure of ideas, especially on the Labor side? One could blame the sclerotic structures of Labor, the choking off any means other than lifelong sub-sub-factions or fronting Midnight Oil to make it to a position of some power, the creation of a monoculture of hacks? It’s partly that, but if there was a real groundswell of people with new ideas and demands, they would be banging at the door with such force that even the factional powers-that-be could not hold them down.

In that respect, one has to look at the systematic and relentless narrowing of debate in the large-scale mainstream media — in News Ltd, simply by turning the organisation into a right-wing propaganda machine of immense obviousness and crudity, and at Fairfax by largely dispensing with any sort of space for bigger ideas altogether — save for the moral panics of the SMH’s enormous roster of right-wing columnists.

With honourable exceptions, Fairfax has become a wasteland of blah economic comment within a narrow range of options, tedious political handicapping, and then a sprinkling of articles, in The Age primarily, that sound as if they came from a community services regional office social work newsletter. With the gradual shaving down, or closing down altogether, of sections that once had space for essays and longer pieces, with op-ed pages that never connect to a broader spectrum of intellectual and political history, the wider intellectual framework within which a more imaginative politics might evolve, is greatly diminished.

There is also the lack of a mid-level political-intellectual hinterland — with no weeklies of the order such as The Nation or the National Review in the US, and the only large-scale monthly, The Monthly, having turned out to be a timid and trailing exercise in colour-supplement reportage, and rather foolish as it turned out, Ruddolatry.

Some of this is simply a matter of economies of scale, but that excuse can be over used. These newspapers used to be better, both in quality, and, in News Ltd’s case, in terms of basic moral integrity. Australia used to have a range of mid-level publications — larger than the small magazines, smaller than the papers, that provided part of the conveyor-belt by which a continuous process of renovation was made possible.

Paul Kelly’s lament is ridiculous because, he as much as anyone, has been a key driver in making Australian political debate a narrowly focused discussion of methods for a series of unquestioned and undebated ends, a society measured solely by growth, and with the common good defined largely by corporate interest. To suddenly turn around and complain about the wasteland he helped create is either supremely obtuse or a bit bloody rich.

A lot of editors of such publications know this — they complain about proprietors, boards, and overwhelmingly of a lack of audience for such material. Fair enough. There’s some truth in that. But was that ever not so? Hasn’t it always been the case that a newspaper or magazine that believed itself to be doing something important, would try and push its readers to think more broadly, more widely, than political writing more appropriate to either covering the greyhounds, or Paris Hilton?

One of the reasons that the famed Age editor Graeme Perkin is periodically feted with a praise so excessive that it approaches ancestor worship, is that everyone is doing the precise opposite of what he was trying to do with The Age — and paying obeisance to his shade is a way of assuaging the guilt about publishing the nine-hundredth piece about S-x and The City, or some obvious 2000-word analysis of what Albo said to Ludwig, according to blah blah. Has the liberal middle audience collapsed to such a degree that more intelligent writing about life and society can no longer be sustained?

If it has, then it is because of the third part of the puzzle, the last element in the circle — the atomisation of public life, the alienation of anything resembling the political, from most people’s conception of their own lives. In the 1920s in Australia, a debate on control of banking between a socialist and a distributist could easily attract 500 people. In the 1940s, pamphlets by either the Communist Party or the NCC could sell in the tens of thousands. Into the ’70s and ’80s, the Nation Review and the National Times could push the envelope. Despite ever higher levels of education and literacy, that realm has substantially, though not totally, disappeared (indeed, this publication is one of its examples).

Here we come back to Bernard Keane’s lament that blame for the sorry state of Australian politics lies with the public. I sympathise with his frustration, but when you start blaming the people (and demanding that they be deposed and a new people installed, so the Party will not be let down), then it’s a fair bet that you’re barking up the wrong decision-tree. Far better to try and analyse what has occurred, why at some point, a decisive gap developed between political process and mass social life — developed, and then became a yawning chasm.

Twenty years ago, we — or the political elites — made a decision to shift the centre of gravity from public to private life, in a whole range of areas, from social expenditure, to pensions, to the question of work hours and wages, in every conceivable field. That is, of course, but of a larger global process — and one, to a degree beyond the control of individual governments — but we really ram-rodded it here, off a fairly collective base.

The result has been a certain type of society in which both the space for public life, and the means by which people without much social power could project themselves into it, has been diminished. Where in the 1980s we were talking — briefly — of the 35-hour week, we are now heading towards the 48-hour week (and two salaries, to afford a house), performed by people living in spec-built suburbs with little amenity, in under-serviced cities, and in conditions of diminishing, not increasing, social mobility for themselves and their children.

In these circumstances, the private choice — the cable TV, the McMansion, the retreat to the home space and to the defiant, antinomian cry (much heard in the UK election) “I don’t do politics” — becomes overdetermined, becomes the only real choice there is. Yet even as people pursue their lives in the wilderness of plasmas, they are privy to a never-ending cascade of information informing them that a) the current way of life is politically, economically, and ecologically unsustainable and b) the gap between their lives and the levers of power is so huge there’s bugger all they an do about it in the current framework.

Those things that need a public sphere in order to exist — such as the res publica, and a genuinely pluralist media — lapse into a non-democratic condition, the res publica as the realm of a caste of political professionals, the media as driven by cynical and self-defeating idea of “content delivery”. The parties narrow down to a core of pollsters and heavies, the public is further alienated, they become less interested in anything in the media which might be a little more expansive, which means the media stops challenging the parties, who then become yet more … and round it goes.

To blame the public for the changed conditions of their life, and the way that earlier decisions by an elite shaped their lives, is to finger the victim, not the culprit. A series of cave-ins, ducked battles, and soft options by the people who controlled parties, papers and powers, and a refusal to stand up to the genuinely malign, has brought us to this point. It seems distinctive in the world — there is a collapse of political legitimacy everywhere, but only in Australia have I seen this degree of total exasperation and frustration, combined with an inability, at the moment, to imagine how it could be done any other way. The topic is cancer, indeed.