In the four decades since The Dismissal showed us the possibilities of winner-takes-all politics, we have witnessed the victory of pettiness and soundbites over vision and substance, writes Jonathan Green.

There's more to all of this than our quiet awe as the fondly recalled components of the Whitlam legacy are paraded.

There are cheers for the policy pageant of land rights, universal health care, tariff cuts, equal pay and all the rest.

But there is also a darker undertone. At the heart of this moment of national sadness and reflection is a comparison: between then and now, between a time of transformation and national ambition and the bitterly contested mundanities of the present.

It's not a flattering contrast, but then the times have conspired against grandeur in contemporary politics.

Whitlam looks Periclean in retrospect, a man in full, a statesman, a leader; a man from a time when politics shared his policy scope and deep sense of calculated purpose.

Our times have delivered us rather different results.

Today we have a government that campaigns on slogans rather than programs, then fumbles to fill that intellectual and policy vacuum in office. A government that, unlike Whitlam, struggles to pass its first budget through a hostile Senate. A Prime Minister who makes a crowd-pleasing play of physical threat to a world leader ("I'm going to shirt-front Mr Putin... you bet I am"), while Whitlam saw the potential of a mature relationship with our region ("a generation of lost contact between our peoples has ended").

Today we have a Labor party struggling to heal the schisms cut by plays of ego and narrow ambition, where Whitlam worked assiduously over a decade to patch a party rent by the deepest of moral and ideological divides. Today we have an opposition struggling to offer more than an imitation of the constant negativity of the opposition before it. A Labor party shirking the necessity of reform and intellectual reinvigoration that Whitlam saw as the core of not just electability, but also of a visionary program.

That's the real lesson of the four decades past Whitlam: of the reduction of politics into mean division and pettiness, a contest of soundbites rather than substance.

A signature feature of Whitlam-era politics was the dominant place of the Parliament in the national conversation. What follows from that is argument, rhetoric and serious debate ... a form of contest that benefits politicians from both sides who can hold a tune.

Most modern political communication bypasses the comparatively long form conversation of the chamber. Our political rhetoric compromised by the increasing demand for brevity and repetition made by the various media that dictate the modern style of political performance.

Politics has been diminished, shrunken as a result, played now with the elaborate caution of figures whose primary objective is to communicate broadcastable fragments without being fully seen. The tendency is to smooth and reduce public life, to have it played small: a politics suited to the handheld device rather than the ripely lit smokiness of the vaudeville stage.

That's part of the strange sense of loss that has followed Whitlam's death, a mourning for the whole process of "big P politics" that crosses generations and includes many who would have no memory of the 1970s, but still have a sense of the comparative pygmies that fill the Punch and Judy puppet show theatre of the modern contest.

There's another strand to these obsequies of course, the counter narrative explored with almost indelicate haste by the likes of Greg Sheridan:

But sentimentality, and the overwhelming power of the Labor myth-making machine, should not blind us to the central fact of Whitlam: he was the worst prime minister in our history.

Miranda Devine bemoaned "the myths, the exaggeration and the outright lies", when in fact:

Gough Whitlam led a chaotic big-spending government for less than three years between 1972 and 1975, reaching high farce in the shady Khemlani Loans Affair, and ending when he was dismissed by the governor-general and lost the ensuing election in a catastrophic landslide. That's the truth.

Whitlam was equally disparaged in his day, of course, and a sense that his government lived on borrowed time fuelled his haste in office. He also trod that traditional Australian tension between political ambition and the politically fatal, but banal, notion of arrogance ... as if a politician of meaning and purpose could be anything but arrogant.

Of course, he changed much in a time when change was the most pressing of possibilities, bringing the bracing shock of the new to a country eager for reinvention.

But there is perhaps a bigger truth in the version of his passing offered by Sheridan and his like.

The awkward, dark irony of the Whitlam legacy may be that that its most lasting and transformative element was perhaps the depth of bitter, binary division brought on not so much by The Dismissal, but by the proof that Whitlam's sacking offered of the possibilities of winner-takes-all politics.

As Paul Keating observed, the modern political tussle and its emphasis on power at any cost was born in the bitter scheming of Whitlam's passing, a legacy from which we are struggling still to recover.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.