No question, the introduction of gay marriage will make Maltese history – but what kind of history? I suspect historians will see it as a flashpoint of two developments.

They will not concern themselves too much with who was on the right side of history. There is no right side to history, which has given us the judicial murders of Socrates and Jesus, and the painless death, at a ripe old age, in full comfort, of gangsters and war criminals; the long ascendancy of tyrannies and the short lives of communitarian experiments.

There is too much chance, too many mixed motives, and too many contradictory consequences. Even when it comes to the history of the family, talk about the right side of history is best left to politicians who want to vaunt their vanity and ignorance.

The historians’ attention will be drawn to two more concrete areas. First, there are the means of persuasion. The introduction of gay marriage will be seen as a milestone in the establishment of a liberal ideology in Maltese public culture: what can be said, what can’t, what goes without saying.

Secondly, there is the formal political system. In principle, it’s a parliamentary democracy following the Westminster model. However, the debate preceding the law passed yesterday has seen various aspects of the Westminster model undermined.

That’s to say, the debate revealed either a dismissal or an ignoring or simple ignorance of certain basic features of the Westminster model. Both by some of the politicians and the public.

And here’s the interesting bit. The people undermining the Westminster model included those who were appealing to its virtues – its protection of diverging opinions and an environment of loyal dissent.

It’s not unusual for a political system to be unwittingly undermined by its very supporters. If Malta’s transformation to an institutionalised populist system continues, future historians may well find that the gay marriage debate serves to show how it happened.

First up, they will note the unwitting undermining of electoral platforms.

When the opponents of gay marriage, in principle, dismiss the Nationalist Party’s electoral commitment, they say that that promise was not thoroughly discussed and that its approval was a rubber-stamp in the full throes of an electoral campaign.

That may well be. But if that argument persists, it will simply mean this: it will be impossible for voters in the future to know whether the PN is actually bound by an electoral promise, unless they find out just how thoroughly an issue was debated.

Otherwise, the electoral programme might as well be written on water.

We’re already there with Labour, where meritocratic, environmentalist, and transparency mean whatever Joseph Muscat wants them to mean. And we were on the way there with past PN governments.

If electoral promises don’t count, what does? The leader. And your access to him and his willingness, or calculation, in listening to you.

The programme is substituted by the man. A secular instance of the word made flesh. And, of course, political cults of personality, rather than parliamentary democracy. Next come the confusion – deliberate or otherwise – about parliamentary procedure.

We have a system built to permit – for lack of a better term – adversarial collaboration. Or simply a system that permits both divergence and convergence to be expressed clearly. This is the system of the different readings through which a law passes. The first reading is (usually) simply a reading of the text of the proposed legislation.

The second reading is, conventionally, the stage where MPs vote on whether they agree with the basic ultimate aim of the proposed law. In the case of gay marriage, this asked of PN MPs whether they agreed with gay marriage per se, irrespective the details of the law. Since it was on their platform, it was odd for anyone to vote against.

Next comes the committee stage, where the law is examined clause by clause. Here, someone who voted for the law in the second reading may well express plenty of reservations on the detail, without being inconsistent or a hypocrite.

Finally, there comes the third reading, where the law is voted on as it stands, in its detail. Usually, if people agree with a law in principle, but not in its proposed detail, they would not be acting oddly if they voted Yes in the second reading but No in the third.

Not odd? It’s actually positively conventional. It used to happen often enough in Malta in the past.

It hasn’t happened, though, in the last four years. The Opposition was (I believe) often afraid that the convention is not known enough in the press, and that its meaning would be misreported in the media and exploited by Labour’s spin machine.

It happened this time round as well. Muscat tried to make much of the Opposition’s proposed amendments, as though they were somehow inconsistent with the vote on the second reading.

And Edwin Vassallo chose to vote No on the second reading, knowing that it would attract more media attention than a No vote on the third reading, where his vote would be drowned in the general celebrations.

But what all this means is this: the undermining of an institutionalised mechanism – a true jewel of parliamentary democracy – for showing how dissent can be loyal to principle, difference and convergence at the same time.

The result: another triumph for the idea that it’s either dissent or loyalty, but not both. A triumph, in other words, for polarisation, as well as the idea that divergence means betrayal.

Bad news for pluralism. Good news for caudillo politics.

It will take more than just this debate to transform our parliamentary system. But each time a building block is weakened, it becomes easier for it to happen.

ranierfsadni@europe.com