A delusion of grandeur: Kevin Rudd in politics

If Graham Freudenberg was able to write of Gough Whitlam's political career that it exhibited "a certain grandeur", then for Kevin Rudd we might speak of "a delusion of grandeur."

Many of his most vocal supporters shared in this delusion. For instance his lead cheerleader amongst the Australian intelligentsia, Robert Manne, even went so far as to state that Rudd's critics did not seem to understand that the colossus from Griffith was "an intellectual in politics," who was "struggling" to simultaneously both "understand and change" his world. No self-respecting philosopher king can take seriously Marx's clarion call in the Theses on Feuerbach that "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it".

For Rudd ,and Manne, such an injunction is too modest by half.

The result of the ballot for leadership of the ALP, the "second coming of Rudd," reminds one also of some Marx; first as tragedy, second as farce.

Kevin Rudd, the second time, had essentially stood on two issues, very much related. The first was on the leadership change in 2010 and the second was on the power of factions and democracy within the ALP.

The two are related because prior to his ouster Rudd had shown little concern for the sorry state of democracy within the ALP. Under his stewardship power was centralised amongst a very small group of senior ministers. After June 2010 Rudd discovered the road to Damascus.

June 2010, furthermore, was the ultimate expression of the usurpation of power by the factions. Manne, in a widely cited essay extolling the virtues of Rudd, written when the former Prime Minister was waging a stealthy campaign of destabilisation against Julia Gillard, had the temerity to state that Rudd lost his job because he "clearly failed to attract the minimal loyalty of his cabinet and caucus colleagues." The picture presented is of an assassination of a leader by power hungry faceless men determined to reassert the power of the party machine.

Pity the intellectual in politics.

To the contrary Rudd totally and utterly lost the confidence of his party because of the grandiloquent and odious manner in which he had treated it when in office. For example, by coming and going as he pleased at the ALP national conference. By announcing on radio, well away from the conference, that its resolutions, especially on tax reform, are irrelevant. By sidelining cabinet, even to the extent of exiting cabinet meetings to attend to petty media interviews. Not even Paul Keating would have displayed such brazen contempt.

Whist his poll numbers were high such treatment had to be tolerated. When the protection afforded by these numbers disappeared Rudd became vulnerable. When Rudd carried all before him I had asserted here that his poll numbers were an "asset price bubble," because they were based on branding and packaging rather than substance, just waiting to burst. Given his contemptuous treatment of the party his leadership, I had argued, was based on nothing else.

Though much has changed in the ALP a deeply respected leader immersed in the traditions and values of the labour movement, such as Ben Chifley, would not be ousted, even in today's frenetic political cycle, on the basis of a few bad polls.

In much commentary the events of June 2010 have been likened to a late night NKVD hit upon an innocent and unwitting victim. This quite fraudulent rewriting of Australian political history is one thing that, revealingly, both Robert Manne and The Australian, not to mention Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party, agree upon.

The repudiation of Kevin Rudd in the leadership ballot does not tell us much about the faceless men. What it does tell us is that Labor, from head to toe, emphatically rejects this falsification of history.

Rudd's campaign for the leadership during "the second coming" demonstrates to us that nothing much had changed. Some have asserted that Rudd's behaviour whilst Prime Minister could be explained by mental illness. More likely is that Rudd had a grand conception of his role in Australian politics born of his far too literal interpretation of the mandate given to him in 2007.

The "KEVIN 07" campaign, not to mention his poll numbers, saw Rudd develop a transcendent view of his electoral mandate. It was not the Australian Labor Party that won the 2007 election. It was Kevin Rudd. It was not Kevin Rudd that owed much to Labor. It was Labor that owed Kevin Rudd. That is a complete repudiation of the most basic values and ethos of the labour movement wherever such a movement can be found upon this earth.

Besides, it was not the real Kevin Rudd that people warmed to. The people warmed to the Rudd largely manufactured by advertising agencies.

Rudd's contemptuous attitude toward the Labor Party is best explained by his transcendental interpretation of his role in Australian politics. The leadership challenge demonstrated that, despite his protestations, he is hardly a changed man. The Labor Party, at the behest of the factions, committed a grave sin, of which it needs to absolve itself in the leadership ballot, because he was elected by the people of Australia.

Because Kevin Rudd, for whatever bizarre reason best left to pop cultural theory and marketing to explain, was popular the ALP was obligated to return him to The Lodge. Notice that the same transcendent view of his place in politics still lies at the core of his worldview and of his tilt for the leadership.

What about his related campaign for democracy?

When Stalin was consolidating power in the Soviet Union he did so upon the basis that "deviations," what we in Australia call "factions," needed to be confronted and stamped out. Obviously his stance had little to do with democracy and everything to do with centralising power at the top.

The mere fact that Kevin Rudd was running against the "combined power of the factions" does not necessarily mean that should he have won that democracy would subsequently have reigned. Indeed, Kevin Rudd, partly, when serving as leader concentrated policy making power right at the apex of the parliamentary party on grounds that the factions had too much influence.

On this issue Kevin Rudd, like Stalin before him, has form.

Furthermore, we must be very sceptical when the corporate media wages a campaign against the "faceless men" of the ALP. On the back of a phoney campaign against "faceless men" policy making power within the ALP was taken away from the organisation and handed over to the parliamentary party.

This was done because the parliamentary party is more beholden to corporate power and influence than the organisation. Moreover, the usurpation of power by the parliamentary wing saw the ALP move from being a mass based party to an elite party.

The power of the factions is real. It does undermine democracy. It should be confronted. However, the factions have such power because the ALP is not a mass based party. It is very difficult for formally organised factions to dominate a political party in top-down fashion that is both mass based and where policy is developed democratically through the organisational wing from bottom to top.

Such change can only occur when a pro-democracy movement, a Labor Spring, from the grass-roots develops and takes hold not by way of the second coming of a false prophet.

Working class based parties have always mistrusted their parliamentary members. The fear has always been that members of parliament would develop interests that are at variance with the broader movement.

The same dynamic is at play in the increasingly presidential style elections that we have in Australia.

Elections are dominated by leaders whose persona is packaged by the public relations industry. Elections thereby become what Mark Latham called "Seinfeld" elections, about nothing, where mindless imagery is used to sell elections much as the same firms that construct car advertisements sell us products. Such elections display the form of democracy rather than the substance of democracy.

They also take power away from the people and increase the role of money in elections.

Kevin Rudd's vision was of an ALP where the leader at the top, branded and packaged by the public relations industry, having won a contest of imagery about nothing in particular, what are falsely termed elections, holds court unchallenged and uncontested.

It's a vision the ALP has rejected, and quite rightly so. It's a vision promoted by someone that doesn't understand basic Labor values.