The violent bear it away

Peter Dutton, Donald Trump and the coming Coalition of the Awful

I had a few days alone before Christmas, before Tanya returned from a stint of work in Darwin, and before we hit the road for Christmas in Canberra and Sydney, and I watched a few episodes of a new TV series starring Billy Bob Thornton (an actor I like and wonder about). It’s called Landman and is about a freelance oil man managing—on behalf of some rich dude played by Jon Hamm—a series of smallish wells somewhere in Texas.

In the episodes I got through, the dominant theme that stood out for me was the complete disregard for worker safety, a situation taken for granted by every character in the series. The general vibe was that this was a job that required real men, and real men aren’t going to do anything lame like manage risk.

Die young, stay masculine. It’s the zeitgeist, I suppose.

There is a pervasive sense of violence that underlines the lives of these people, from the wealthiest to the poorest, and such violence is the reality against which everyone measures themselves and others. Wellheads explode during repairs killing everyone in the vicinity; untethered piles of pipe slip and crush someone else: all just another day in the unscripted horror of late capitalism.

I thought of Marx’s line that “capital is dead labour.”

Or this from Heart of Darkness:

“Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

“They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, —nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.

“…in all the legality of time contracts….”

The absolution of power transubstantiated into law.

Writing on BlueSky the other day, legal academic and some-time contributor to these pages, Dr Ingrid Matthews expressed a similar idea about the TV series, Yellowstone. She described it as a “genealogy of USA violence” and it is a description, she notes, that extends well beyond that single show into deep layers of American popular culture.

In that storied place, violence isn’t something to be overcome or regulated but something to be admired and embraced. People die and some desultory compensation is negotiated with the survivors, and the violent—the corporations and the billionaires like the Jon Hamm character—bear it away. In this, it easy to understand Trump and his defining cruelty not as a cause of anything but as a symptom.

We hear a lot about how social media has corrupted the political landscape, enabled the rise of Trump, but the groundwork for him has been laid by decades of popular culture where the most violent person is considered heroic, from Tony Soprano in The Sopranos to Al Swearengen in Deadwood, and fifty other characters you can probably name.

As art, they are incredible, imbued with depth and vulnerability by extraordinary writers like David Chase and David Milch. Untranslated into real life, like Trump, with no artistic spirit to shape them, they are just thugs. Trump, Musk, Vance, the whole cast of Maga clowns currently giving shape to American fascism. The art has paved the way for an acceptance of this unglamourous reality, titillated people with the prospect that the system is so broken and corrupt that only the cleansing power of the ruthless, violent sociopath is equal to the moment.

A recent interview with Joseph O’Neil, one of the few professionals in the country who really is taking the fall of the American Republic seriously, caught the situation perfectly:

My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment.

What triggered these thoughts was an interview I listened to on the long, beautiful drive from Melbourne to Sydney on Christmas Eve. Marc Maron was speaking with Australian film director Justin Kurzel about his films like Snowtown and Nitram and his fascination with such dark characters and the Australian darkness from which they arose. Maron noted at one point that he had always thought of Australia as a sunny, happy place, but that “there is a darkness to Australia I didn’t register”.

I remembered all the kidnapped children of my childhood, the endless news stories of some further child lost at the beach, never to be seen again. This pervasive sense of dread in the happiest place on earth.

I was thinking about Peter Dutton and what the Liberal Party has become.

While I don’t think there is much value in comparing what Dutton is trying to do in Australia to what Trump has already wrought in the United States, there is no doubt that a prime minister Dutton would be a willing recruit into Trump’s Coalition of the Awful. Already his flying monkeys are doing the work of ingratiation and if they can, they will be all in.

Peter Dutton’s ongoing experiments in cruelty are likely to haunt us right up until the next election and beyond if we do actually end up with a Labor minority government. Dutton and his friends in the media will do whatever they can to undermine that arrangement—the last thing they want is proof of concept—and they will scare and titillate us with attacks on whatever groups and individuals they can focus our bloodlust upon.

Look, all states are violent. Political science defines statehood in terms of the legitimate control of violence. Still, the interview with Kurzel gave me some hope that our popular culture doesn’t quite glorify it in a way that is likely to bring forth a real, live Trump.

I accept I may be kidding myself.¹

I also think our democracy is better equipped to resist. It has shown itself so. But it will need a conscious, active practice of resistance, especially given the disposition of our mainstream media and spinelessness of the current government. As Joseph O’Neil put it in the interview I quoted above, “A successful opposition, in such circumstances, will require unusual measures of courage, imagination, adaptability, disruptiveness. New tactics will have to be employed. New people will have to be given leadership positions.”

Our communities are already starting to find this will, I think, but 2025 is likely to show that, for all their success, the battle has barely been joined.

1. Ned Kelly? Mad Max? Chopper?