Friends and foes of Australia’s former prime minister often refer during casual conversation to “good Malcolm” and “bad Malcolm”. Good Malcolm is charm itself. Bad Malcolm? That’s something else again.

Anyone watching politics over the past year or so will know that Turnbull fulminated regularly, and often publicly, about the ABC, joining a longstanding Coalition tradition of ranting against the national broadcaster.

The once-over-lightly explanation for this will be the ABC copped an extended version of bad Malcolm. The communications minister, Mitch Fifield, implicitly referenced this possibility with an in-joke this week. With tongue planted in cheek, Fifield described the former prime minister, in relation to the ABC, as a “mellow” individual. Turnbull is many things, but mellow really isn’t one of them.

My purpose this weekend is not to counter the narrative of bad Malcolm, because bad Malcolm, by many dispassionate accounts, exists, and his censorious spirit hovered around Ultimo like a pursed-lipped hall monitor.

But there is also more to this story than an arbitrary prime ministerial tantrum(s) in the slipstream of a Coalition culture war. The implosion at the top of the ABC, after a long build-up, tells us lots about a lot of things if we take the time to look closely and push slightly beyond a penetrating glimpse of the obvious.

It was always something of a curiosity, the former prime minister’s fixation with thought crimes and (allegedly) deteriorating editorial standards at the ABC when it was News Corp and a cabal of other shriekers coming to pound what remained of his prime ministership into submission.

If you were into psychoanalysis, you might even call this behaviour transference.

But it was more than transference. Turnbull’s bursts of displeasure at the ABC read like the frustration of a political leader who often felt powerless in the face of disruptive forces more powerful than him, his office, or any of us.

Political leaders worry about themselves and their fortunes, often obsessively – that’s a given. The best of them also worry about the state of the zeitgeist and, if you worry about that, frankly, there’s a lot to be worried about.

Political leaders in 2018 are attempting to govern during a time, in cultural terms, of retreat from an agreed set of facts, from truth and from evidence.

For politicians who don’t care about truth and evidence, and engage in shades of demagoguery and outright manipulation, there is no anxiety, there is only opportunity. For the technocrats though, for politicians who still think politics is the art of structured deliberation, these are tough times. There are few certainties.

This is the unacknowledged backdrop sitting behind contemporary political leadership. When politicians survey the evolving media landscape from the temporary safety of their bunkers, they see mass unhinging. The news cycle thunders day and night. The opinion cycle bludgeons mindfulness and nuance into submission.

Media companies, courtesy of the disruption visited on them by the internet and the consequent threats to commercial viability, aren’t rallying new paying readers and viewers by pitching a sober offering of bland neutrality; they are rallying tribes by appealing to people’s values and emotions, because if emotions are stirred, then engagement increases, and engagement is a metric that matters.

So, to cut a long story short, the view from the prime ministerial bunker of all this convulsing and reshaping is not pretty. It must feel like standing in the middle of field with a pack of wild bulls thundering from one end to the other.

So perhaps, if your prime ministership feels like a prolonged state of siege, and you feel the tectonic plates moving around you, entirely indifferent to your fate, you might begin to fixate on something you imagine you can control.

If your prime ministership feels like a prolonged state of siege, you might begin to fixate on something you imagine you can control.

You might fixate on the national broadcaster – an organisation which, in return for its taxpayer funding, is expected to exhibit higher standards of po-faced neutrality than a commercial media industry increasingly presenting to the world as caterwauling, tribal and thuggish.

You might just appoint yourself ABC nitpicker in chief and tell yourself you are doing God’s work. The imperative of structural independence of a cherished institution might feel, to you, like a second-order concern, when the whole environment feels like the badlands, and takes no prisoners. It isn’t a second-order concern of course, but it might feel like it.

This broader dynamic I’m referencing, an impulse on the part of politicians to tame the animal spirits of the public square, was also sighted during the time of the last Labor government.

The minority Labor government certainly didn’t train their guns on the ABC, but there was the Finkelstein review that recommended a new statutory body, the News Media Council, be created to set and enforce journalistic standards. Julia Gillard famously advised journalists not to write crap.

The examples are different but the instinct to assert a modicum of control over the fragmenting, punishing discourse goes to the heart of the least interrogated story in politics: the story where contemporary governments feel powerless, because, mostly, they are.

It’s a hard story to tell, because almost no one inside the system is brave enough to the truth. Access journalism also doesn’t facilitate the truth telling, because the implicit contract of access journalism is people writing up more of the default mythology: that there is always a cunning plan, executed by cunning and enlightened people in power, when, mostly, government is just a rolling shit fight, particularly in an era of riven political parties populated by cookie-cutter ideologues who install and then tear down their figureheads of convenience, and equate any compromise with weakness.

What’s gone on inside the government and the ABC to lead us inexorably to the dramatic events of this week is a complex story, and its core facts will obviously be contested by the various protagonists and their competing spin doctors. New facts will likely emerge.

But, on what is currently known, anxiety sits at the heart of the tale.

An anxious prime minister transmits anxiety to the chairman of the national broadcaster either specifically or generically. Chairman, meanwhile, has significant anxieties of his own – principally, preserving ongoing funding for a publicly funded organisation that finds itself at the centre of a vicious culture war that has amplified courtesy of disruption in the media landscape. Anxious chairman apparently thinks the crux of his job is to keep the government, the bill payer, happy.

By Justin Milne’s own, unguarded account, his task as ABC chairman was to be a “conduit” not a “wall” and his view was “you can’t go around irritating the person who is going to give you funding again and again and again, if it’s over matters of accuracy and impartiality”.

“The government is a fundamentally important stakeholder in the ABC and it is necessary, and I think it is the role of the board, to be a conduit, so we all know, so the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, and we understand how people are feeling about things”.

When you line up these dynamics, you can see how things can become addled. The whole show combusted when a long period of anxiety culminated in sudden, swift action. The departure of Michelle Guthrie triggered the departure of Milne. Turnbull, of course, had already departed.

While facts are still being established, the take-home spectacle for the public is a bunch of people too punch-drunk to grasp the basic fundamentals of their jobs, or the imperative of maintaining clear lines, or most importantly – the importance of safeguarding the institutions of which they are temporary custodians.

After a week of takedowns and trashing, what remains is recrimination about apparent failures of judgment and of governance both on the part of politicians, and at one of Australia’s most cherished institutions, the national broadcaster.

This is a fascinating, and unsettling, story about the dynamics of contemporary public life, at so many levels.