We Are All Hell's Angels Now

Or at least Trump voters are.

We parents tell our children that when you know you’ve lost an argument or a race, the right thing to do is to be a good sport and to “get ’em next time.” But if there is no next time, or you know that every next time you are going to be in the loser’s lane again, what’s the use of being a good sport? It would make you look even more ignorant, and more like a loser, to pretend like you think you have a chance. The game has been rigged against you. Why not piss on the field before you storm off? Why not stick up your finger at the whole goddamned game?

If you are of the opinion that the prevailing emotion for Trump voters in this election was “I want you to hurt like I do,” you will find a lot in this piece to agree with. Hunter S. Thompson has a bad rap these days because of how the dudes who look to him as an influence are terrible in and of themselves but also as a malign force in whatever survives of “journalism” and, to a lesser extent, because of the self-parody he became in his later years, but Hell’s Angels, his chronicle of “left-behind people motivated only by ‘an ethic of total retaliation,’” came long before either of those things, and the argument advanced here — that it was an early warning sign of what we just saw happen— is worth entertaining.

This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson.