Cometh the hour, cometh the half-man. Former prime minister John Howard returned to the fray last week, with a strong attack on the Yes contingent in the Coalition, for failing to specify the conditions for protection of religious freedom, should there be a successful Yes vote, and then an act in Parliament to ratify same-sex marriage.

Gor, it were just like old times weren’t it. The suburban solicitor, now snow-white of hair, with his improbable political charisma to a good 40% of the population — the lack of crazed rhetoric, the calm delivery, the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger delivery of a sheer unvarnished political lie. We should enjoy it while it lasts; it’s like going to a return tour by The Vines, the performance made more piquant by the quiet thought, he won’t be back round again. Nor him. Nor him.

“I I I I I feel that the provisions for religious freedom should have been enunciated it be-be-be before the plebiscite,” the Rodent said, or words to that effect. Sure, like the details of EU departure were spelt out before the Brexit referendum, where Howard supported the No case. Translation: it looks like the No case is going to lose the process we put in to delay same-sex marriage, and we will be faced with the ghastly prospect: not the Boschian disaster the No case purportedly envisages, but that, like New Zealand, the UK, Canada, Ireland and elsewhere, the change will pass without incident or knock-on.

John Howard has reappeared for one reason: there’s no real leadership in the No case, no figure flying the flag as s/he leaps over the trench parapet. But that’s been no great disadvantage to the No case, because there’s no leadership in the Yes case either. Both sides have been compelled into this hate-fuck of a political process, and there seems a curious decentredness to the whole process. Is this the new form of social politics? That we don’t need visible leaders anymore, that a process doesn’t need to be personified in an MLK, a Jane Jacobs, a Harvey Milk?

Well, good, maybe, if so. But not, if, as I suspect, the lack of a public leader is indicative of a lack of leadership, especially in the Yes case. Furthermore, the haunting fear might be that only one side is this disorganised. Though the No case lacks a public figure, I do not believe it lacks leadership or co-ordination. Why are its TV spots popping up, its leaflets in the Thai take-away, why are its campaigners in and around the last two shopping centres I visited?

Well, we already know the answer. The cultural right remains situated in face-to-face life, and its religious contingent have a collective consciousness that the cultural left has largely lost. The former submerge their self-hoods into boring services, boring meetings, boring demos. The cultural left have single demos that double as performance art extravaganzas. Then they go home, and “like” photos of the wittiest placards on their twibonned Instagram. The danger for the Yes case is that they won’t have done enough to convince advocates that simply expressing your affect is not enough to get out the vote. Any real encounter is worth twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred online ones. But real encounters — getting in the face of busy people — is icky, and doubly icky for the digital homesteaders of the Yes case.

This is how Yes might lose — in the same way that Brexit was lost, Trump became President, Obama lost Ted Kennedy’s seat, and the Senate, in his first term, and so on. I actually think they probably won’t, though I think the No case will leap far beyond their 30% base, but it will only be because of the rightness of the cause itself (in current liberal terms), as a simple extension of the domain of equality. There may not be much in it. The Yes case cannot find the enthusiasm to advocate for a right they believe, US-style, is implicit and God-given, rather than something to be politically achieved. The No case has spotted an opportunity to stop the progressive advance in its tracks, not merely in Australia, but in the Anglosphere West. They dream of the audacious upset, as they pound the pavements of Campsie, Ringwood, Semaphore, Mandurah, Indooroopilly. They will regard anything above 40% as a win, and use it accordingly.

But the Coalition No contingent is afeared they won’t get that – and hence the “religious freedom” bullshit. It is right up Howard’s alley, in that there isn’t a skerrick of evidence to build a case from. The plebiscite forces nothing, guarantees nothing, creates no greater legitimacy for Safe Schools, marrying bridges, bestiality, etc, per se, and the question of the staffing, etc, rights of religious-run hospitals, schools and businesses (beyond their actual work operation) is governed by other laws (as we noted last week). It’s a campaign built out of nothing.

But that’s where Howard’s right at home. Like his two compatriots of the last era of actual politics — Paul Keating and Bob Brown — Howard has to be in a political cause facing immediate extinction before he can get seriously excited. Those put-upon eyes, the face of the beleaguered and shunned petite bourgeoisie, the forgotten people, atop that coprophagic grin, as he summons a vision of three men marrying a tractor in St Patrick’s Cathedral, the priest officiating at police gunpoint. No one else has quite the gusto or the brio to do it. This is the man who, in 2013, proudly told us that he had taken a position accepting climate change because it was politically expedient.

Before the 2007 federal election, Howard pledged a re-elected conservative government would introduce an emissions trading scheme (ETS).

AAP reports he now says that was because by late 2006 his government hit a “perfect storm” with ongoing drought, severe water restrictions, bushfires and the release of the (Lord Nicholas) Stern Review and Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. 

“To put it bluntly, ‘doing something’ about global warming gathered strong political momentum in Australia,” Mr Howard said in his written lecture.  

The voice of the Rodent. And now Geoff Cousins, a strategist who claims to have helped the Coalition defeat the 1988 multi-part referendum on federal/state powers, has claimed that Howard is simply replaying the “big fear” strategy developed then (the horror! Political cynicism used to the wrong purpose!)

Can Howard tease out, or switch back from Yes to No a crucial 3-4%? You bet he can. But part of what he is relying on to do so is the vacuum created by the absence of a truly forceful Yes campaign, one wholly abandoning discussion of fragility and harm and depression (real though these might be), and focused on one thing only: winning the vote, and winning it as something straightforward, obvious and unfussed. Maybe there’s a strategy in place, to minimise street-level politicisation to dampen the No vote or … I dunno. It might all be straightforward, but one can’t help but wonder at a political movement that doesn’t seem to want to be political — to such a degree that someone like the Rodent can plausibly re-insert themselves.

By contrast, for the Yes case, for the wider “progressive” agenda, this pile-on by the right is actually an opportunity. They’re throwing everything at this; the bad faith is immense. The sheer vacuity of their arguments around religious freedom is a gamble. Should it fail, and same-sex marriage become an unremarkable part of everyday life, then the utility of Big Fear — the idea that it can be switched to any issue, anywhere — will be much diminished. By no means dissolved, and there will still be issues which have a genuine conservative argument and side to them. Given all that, it seems unwise to be emphasising the victim status of a side that is trying to impose its will — because that is ultimately what politics is — and doing so on the affirmative, change-making side of the argument. The Yes case could really do with one or two big public faces/leaders now.

The result will be fascinating, the weeks to come will be fascinating, and for the Rodent, a last chance to see …