"No one in public life can match his capacity for shamelessly manipulating events and injecting himself into the centre of attention."

That's Mark Latham, writing yesterday in The Australian Financial Review. Of Kevin Rudd. On a day when we had the spectacle of Latham himself becoming an equal opportunity pest, gate crashing Tony Abbott's veterans affairs policy announcement in Penrith.

And Mark Simkin on ABC News last night was unable to resist the temptation of presenting an election report principally about Latham "overshadowing" everything else, without even the incentive of the bizarre cross-promotion antics of Nine and the pot shots fired by its rivals at Seven.

It's the ultimate in performativity, really, the self-fulfilling statement. Nothing compels Simkin, or anyone else, to report on Latham's doings.

Nothing prevents Simkin from focusing his reporting on the details of Tony Abbott's policy for veterans, the Coalition's tax launch, more on Julia Gillard's announcement on the NBN, or for that matter Ursula Stephens' plans for the non-profit sector; all things of some moment for our nation.

So why are we talking about Mark Latham at all?

On one level, the answer is obvious. It's somewhere between the desire to gaze at a train wreck and the temptation to look at that shiny thing over there.

On the other hand, the bizarre spectacle of the Man From Green Valley's reappearance in the blaze of television lights has a more profound implication for our politics.

Julian Morrow observed last night on the televisual version of The Drum that Latham isn't a half bad commentator (and by the by, Morrow outshone Bruce Hawker and his Liberal counterpart in that capacity himself).

If we set Latham's recent long article on the travails of modern Labor in the Fin Review alongside Mark Aarons' piece in The Monthly, it stands up well. If anything, Latham has a better stab at placing recent ALP developments within a historical context and identifying just what the specific difference is between the Mark Arbibs of 2010 and the Graham Richardsons of 1980, something Aarons struggled with on Lateline.

But, in all likelihood, no one will take Latham seriously on this question.

His column in the Fin oscillates wildly between surprising insight and trivial gossip and character assessments, much in the vein of his notorious Diaries.

In discussing Latham's significance, I want to stay well away from the usual exercises in amateur psychology. What's more interesting is that Latham literally can't make his ideas heard, because his own discourse so perfectly reflects the trivialisation and personalisation of the political contest he wants to decry.

The irony, here, is that Latham was once someone who genuinely did inject some ideas into political debate. Most of them I disagreed with, and I said so as long ago as 1998 in Overland. For my pains, I got a serve from Latham, which left my father somewhat surprised at the claim that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth.

But, nevertheless, although Civilising Global Capital obscured the fact in its dense quasi-Hegelian prose, the Latham of the late 90s and early 2000s was onto something in diagnosing some of the woes of our times, even if his prescriptions were questionable.

Like Gough Whitlam in Werriwa before him, Latham tried to understand what was distinctive about the experience of suburban life in contemporary Australia. It was too limited in scope to Western Sydney, and later to degenerate into the "affluenza" thesis beloved of the Clive Hamilton set, but he did pose some searching questions about the quality and meaning of everyday lives.

Latham's policy ideas were something of a mishmash of New Labour communitarianism and human capital theory, veering unfortunately into a politics in 2004 which was more about status discontent than the "class warfare" label pinned on him by John Howard and the commentariat.

Still, he recognised that our experience of life is often troublingly discontinuous, that stable and secure working lives were becoming an exception rather than the rule, and that contemporary global capitalism had inscribed a vacuity in the hearts of many. He also insisted that the state had a genuine role to play, not just in equalising opportunities but also in remedying inequalities.

There's a thread running between his thought and that of Kevin Rudd - a rather thin string of social democratic continuity, a recognition that global capital posed a problem and not just the opportunity it's normally represented as for Australia.

But Latham, as an electoral politician, could not work out how to sell this vision, except by analogy from his own story. Just like Kevin Rudd, really.

Contemporary Australian political debate reduces everything to the personal and 'character', and simultaneously sows the seeds of personal destruction, even self-destruction, for those who want to step outside the narrow margins of its script.

That may be the real tragedy for both Mark Latham and ourselves - to think seriously about how we might want to live otherwise is to risk being portrayed as mad, and certainly to risk becoming maddened. Think, too, of Kevin Rudd's "anger" in David Marr's portrait.

It's a waste, and a pity.

Dr Mark Bahnisch is a sociologist and a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development. He founded the leading public affairs blog, Larvatus Prodeo.