{"id":175800,"date":"2020-11-24T19:16:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-25T00:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/11\/24\/hunter-s-thompson-prophesied-the-spite-voter\/"},"modified":"2020-11-24T19:16:00","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T00:16:00","slug":"hunter-s-thompson-prophesied-the-spite-voter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/11\/24\/hunter-s-thompson-prophesied-the-spite-voter\/","title":{"rendered":"Hunter S. Thompson Prophesied the Spite Voter"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a number of occasions, I have referenced Mark Ames seminal essay, “Spite the vote<\/a>,” in which he posits that the hoi polloi (\u03bf\u1f31 \u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03bb\u03bf\u03af) are not mindless zombies brainwashed by Fox News and Karl Rove (this was written in 2004), and realized that they literally had no place in the future envisioned by liberals, and so tried to pull everything down around the heads. <\/p>\n

This sounds even more relevant 16 years later, but I think that using the word seminal may have been an overstatement, because before Mark Ames, there was Hunter S. Thompson<\/a>, who wrote about this same phenomenon in his breakthrough book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs<\/i> in 1966: <\/p>\n

In late March, Donald Trump opened a rally in Wisconsin by mocking the state\u2019s governor, Scott Walker, who had just endorsed his Republican opponent, Ted Cruz. \u201cHe came in on his Harley,\u201d Trump said of Walker, \u201cbut he doesn\u2019t look like a motorcycle guy.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cThe motorcycle guys,\u201d he added, \u201clike Trump.\u201d <\/p>\n

It has been 50 years since Hunter S. Thompson published the definitive book on motorcycle guys: Hell\u2019s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs<\/i>. It grew out of a piece first published in The Nation one year earlier. My grandfather, Carey McWilliams, editor of the magazine from 1955 to 1975, commissioned the piece from Thompson\u2014it was the gonzo journalist\u2019s first big break, and the beginning of a friendship between the two men that would last until my grandfather died in 1980. Because of that family connection, I had long known that Hell\u2019s Angel<\/i>s was a political book. Even so, I was surprised, when I finally picked it up a few years ago, by how prophetic Thompson is and how eerily he anticipates 21st-century American politics. This year, when people asked me what I thought of the election, I kept telling them to read Hell\u2019s Angels<\/i>. <\/p>\n

Most people read Hell\u2019s Angels<\/i> for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What\u2019s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their \u201cethic of total retaliation\u201d against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they\u2019d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on. <\/p>\n

What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren\u2019t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation <\/i>piece he later expanded on in Hell\u2019s Angels<\/i>, that kind of politics is \u201cnearly impossible to deal with\u201d using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Thompson would want us to see this: These are men and women who know that, by all intellectual and economic standards, they cannot win the game. So whether it be out of self-protection or an overcompensation for their own profound sense of shame, they lash out at politicians, judges, scientists, teachers, Wall Street, universities, the media, legislatures\u2014even at elections. They are not interested in contemplating serious reforms to the system; they are either too pessimistic or too disappointed to believe that is possible. So the best they can do is adopt a position of total irreverence: to show they hate the players and the game.  <\/p>\n

Understood in those terms, the idea that Trumpism is \u201cpopulist\u201d seems misplaced. Populism is a belief in the right of ordinary people, rather than political insiders, to rule. Trumpism, by contrast, operates on the presumption that ordinary people aren\u2019t going to get any chance to rule no matter what they do, so they might as well piss off the political insiders using the only tool left available to them: the vote.  <\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

54 Years ago, and it sounds like today.<\/p>\n

It’s telling that this awareness seems to flow down dynastic lines, Susan McWilliams’ grandfather gave Thompson the assignment to cover the motorcycle gang, and her current position as a tenured professor at an expensive and respected private liberal arts college, (Pomona) certainly as a results of advantages that came from who her parents (and grandparents) were.<\/p>\n

Far too many people who have won the birth lottery, and so were born on third base think that they hit a triple.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a number of occasions, I have referenced Mark Ames seminal essay, “Spite the vote,” in which he posits that the hoi polloi (\u03bf\u1f31 \u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03bb\u03bf\u03af) are not mindless zombies brainwashed by Fox News and Karl Rove (this was written in 2004), and realized that they literally had no place in the future envisioned by liberals, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[635,389,523,374,606],"class_list":["post-175800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-class","tag-history","tag-journalism","tag-politics","tag-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175800"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175800\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}