John Dutton: the last lord

Thoughts on Yellowstone and the Mafia

Dear S,

Anthony Everitt says, in his biography of Cicero, that ancient Rome didn’t have any official police. What they did have was families. A particularly wealthy family with connections, usually led by a patriarch, would provide “services” such as justice or a loan or a free meal to the people — and those people they served would be known as clients.

Thus a mob would form around particular fathers and be called up on command, and they would keep the peace and help those in need. At least that’s what they were supposed to do. If you and your pals had enough clientele, you could also let them loose on the Senate. Maybe this is why Italians organized for illegal purposes are called “the Mob.”

Thus inside Rome there were many governments within government — the obvious effect of laissez faire policy. When powerful men wanted something done, they didn’t just ask for permission; they called on their henchmen. They wouldn’t just cite laws; they would pull strings. Thus the idea of The Mafia isn’t just Italian: it’s eternal. It exists everywhere there isn’t a central power useful and effective enough to provide order and basic services — the central message of Leviathan.

Every rich and practical man is a Mafia don in utero. He begins by being useful, and legitimizes himself by justified acts of violence — which he eventually tries to get a monopoly on. The history of the Dark Ages is a history of government starting as a mom-and-pop store and turning into Amazon and Walmart. Every empire is an underdog story that went too well — and as we all know, eventually too far.

This is also the story of Yellowstone, in large part: Taylor Sheridan’s vision of the Dutton family in Montana. John Dutton is (in essence) a petty lord struggling to maintain his power, his rights, and his patrimony in a land where government is too small in some cases, too large in others, and too susceptible to power interests. The Indians in the show (and their vulnerability and destitution) are a reminder of what happens when your team isn’t strong enough to ward off the other families. The message of the show, over and over again, implicitly and explicitly, is that you can become the new Indian. There is no such thing as “rights.” There's only power; and those who either can’t or won’t wield it will be lorded over by those who can. Usually for the worse.

This is the whole appeal of the show, in fact. In a society where we see the FDA bought and run by the petty kings of Big Pharma, and cities run over by race rioters, and millions invading the border — what else are we supposed to believe, but that titles and rights are a lie? Pontius Pilate said what is truth? and we finally understand what he meant. In the past few years we've seen billionaires and Ivy League schools and corporate media decide not only what we can say, but what we can hear; and outright lies aren’t just peddled about obvious facts like race and gender and medical statistics, but enforced.

We are living in an age of post-law, post-truth, post-democracy: we see strings pulled and rightful winners dethroned. We see the talented pushed aside and the worst of us put at the helm — not by the people they serve, but by shadow-rulers and unelected bureaucrats. We’ve witnessed (most egregiously in the case of The Proud Boys) those standing up for law and order jailed — this injustice itself proclaimed as an act of law and order. We’ve seen good citizens thrown out of work and illegals given free smartphones and thousands for food and rent. What is legitimate? we ask. Is it something done by the government? Or is it something done for a particular people — a clientele? The idealistic say it's something done that makes sense for everyone. But is there even an “everyone”? Or is the whole world made of petty factions, with opposite interests and limited resources?

These are the big questions that Yellowstone constantly brings up (at least in the first three seasons I've seen), and it usually delivers a single answer: that only those rich and organized and mean enough will decide it for us. And deep down, we know they’re right*. Law and order and justice are only possible when the just and fair are in charge — and right now they obviously aren’t. A constitutional republic is only feasible when the average man is educated and responsible and organized and manly.

Thus Yellowstone is an appeal to the feudal man inside each of us: not a yearning for the old lords, but the admission that they've always existed, and that we need them on our side. It capitalizes on the deep-down feeling of the Democratic man — atomized and alone in society, his voice and vote drowned out by millions of men, faceless as himself — that nobody great is fighting for his way of life, his land, or his particular people. It’s the need for someone, a strong man, a leader, to stand above the crowd and say enough — this is ours. And just as much as this, it's the need for us to feel like we have others’ backs and they have ours — even if it risks beatings, or prison, or death. Our side may not be perfect, but at least they're ours.

This is what the Dutton family signifies: a whole moral order that Americans and Europeans had abandoned for centuries. A way of life that prizes honor and loyalty and authority instead of just compassion and empathy: two things that turned into debasing your own people and selling them out.

But even more than this, the Duttons are a reminder that fighting for what’s “yours” is ugly — and it has always been ugly**. But if you don’t do it for yourself, and lord over it rightly, nobody else is going to do it for you. And it's plainspoken about how that turns out too.

Yours,

-J

*Emerson writes of men making and breaking society in his essay On Politics:

In dealing with the State we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good, we may make better. Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres, but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement and compel the system to gyrate round it; as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato or Paul, does forever.

**Regarding the ugliness of protecting what’s yours, here’s a quote from a random account on X,

Every measure you would have to take to protect your people so they can keep existing and not go extinct falls under the definition of “racism.”

Deep down inside we want this to be false. But is it?