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

In Hell’s Angels, the gonzo journalist wrote about left-behind people motivated only by “an ethic of total retaliation.” Sound familiar?

By Susan McWilliams The Nation

In late March, Donald Trump opened a rally in Wisconsin by mocking the state’s governor, Scott Walker, who had just endorsed his Republican opponent, Ted Cruz. “He came in on his Harley,” Trump said of Walker, “but he doesn’t look like a motorcycle guy.”

“The motorcycle guys,” he added, “like Trump.”

It has been 50 years since Hunter S. Thompson published the definitive book on motorcycle guys: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. 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—it was the gonzo journalist’s 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’s Angels 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’s Angels.

Thompson observed that the Hell’s Angels were alienated from a changing America in which they felt left behind.

Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s 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 “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d 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.

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’t 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 piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.

Listen to Hunter S. Thompson speak with Studs Turkel about ‘Hell’s Angels’ in 1967.

Hell’s Angels concludes when the Angels ally with the John Birch Society and write to President Lyndon Johnson to offer their services to fight communism, much to the befuddlement of the anti-Vietnam elites who assumed the Angels were on the side of “counterculture.” The Angels and their retaliatory militarism were, Thompson warned, the harbingers of a darker time to come. That time has arrived.

* * *

Fifty years after Thompson published his book, a lot of Americans have come to feel like motorcycle guys. At a time when so many of us are trying to understand what happened in the election, there are few better resources than Hell’s Angels. That’s not because Thompson was the only American writer to warn coastal, left-liberal elites about their disconnection from poor and working-class white voters. Plenty of people issued such warnings: journalists like Thomas Edsall, who for decades has been documenting the rise of “red America,” and scholars like Christopher Lasch, who saw as early as the 1980s that the elite embrace of technological advancement and individual liberation looked like a “revolt” to the mass of Americans, most of whom have been on the losing end of enough “innovations” to be skeptical about the dogmas of progress.

But though Thompson’s depiction of an alienated, white, masculine working-class culture—one that is fundamentally misunderstood by intellectuals—is not the only one out there, it was the first. And in some ways, it is still the best psychological study of those Americans often dismissed as “white trash” or “deplorables.”

Thompson’s Angels were mostly working-class white men who felt, not incorrectly, that they had been relegated to the sewer of American society. Their unswerving loyalty to the nation— the Angels had started as a World War II veterans group—had not paid them any rewards or won them any enduring public respect. The manual-labor skills that they had learned and cultivated were in declining demand. Though most had made it through high school, they did not have the more advanced levels of training that might lead to economic or professional security. “Their lack of education,” Thompson wrote, “rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy.” Looking at the American future, they saw no place for themselves in it.

The Angels were the original “strangers in their own land”—clunky and outclassed like their Harleys.

In other words, the Angels felt like “strangers in their own land,” as Arlie Russell Hochschild puts it in her recent book on red-state America. They were clunky and outclassed and scorned, just like the Harley-Davidsons they chose to drive. Harleys had been the kings of the American motorcycle market until the early 1960s, when European and Japanese imports came onto the scene. Those imports were sleeker, faster, more efficient, and cheaper. Almost overnight, Harleys went from being in high demand to being the least appealing, most underpowered, and hard to handle motorcycles out there. It’s not hard to see why the Angels insisted on Harleys and identified strongly with their bikes.

Just as there was no rational way to defend Harleys against foreign-made choppers, the Angels saw no rational grounds on which to defend their own skills or loyalties against the emerging new world order of the late 20th century. Their skills were outdated; their knowledge was insubstantial; their powers were inferior. There was no rational way to argue that they were better workers or citizens than the competition; the competition was effectively over, and Angels had lost. The standards by which they had been built had been definitively eclipsed.

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?

Therein lies the ethic of total retaliation. The Angels, rather than gracefully accepting their place as losers in an increasingly technical, intellectual, global, inclusive, progressive American society, stuck up their fingers at the whole enterprise. If you can’t win, you can at least scare the bejeesus out of the guy wearing the medal. You might not beat him, but you can make him pay attention to you. You can haunt him, make him worry that you’re going to steal into his daughter’s bedroom in the darkest night and have your way with her—and that she might actually like it.

* * *

It’s not hard to see in the demographics, the words, and the behavior of Trump supporters an ethic of total retaliation at work. These are men and women who defend their vote by saying things like: “I just wanted people to know that I’m here, that I count.” These are men and women whose scorn of “political correctness” translates into: “You can’t make me talk the way that you want me to talk, even if that way of talking is nicer and smarter and better.” These are men and women whose denials of climate change are gleeful denials of scientific expertise in a world where scientific experts have unquestioned intellectual respect and social status. These are men and women who seemed to applaud the incompetence of Trump’s campaign because competence itself is associated with membership in the elite.

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—even 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.

Understood in those terms, the idea that Trumpism is “populist” 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’t 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.

While many commentators say Trump will have to bring back jobs or vibrancy to places like the Rust Belt if he wants to continue to have the support of people who voted for him, Thompson’s account suggests otherwise. Many if not most Trump supporters long ago gave up on the idea that any politician, even someone like Trump, can change the direction the wind is blowing. Even if he fails to bring back the jobs, Trump can maintain loyalty in another way: As long as he continues to offend and irritate elites, and as long as he refuses to play by certain rules of decorum—heaven forfend, the president-elect says ill-conceived things on Twitter!—Trump will still command loyalty. It’s the ethic, not the policy, that matters most.

The racism unleashed by Trump can be understood as directed at the political elite rather than minority groups.

Even the racism that was on full display in Trump’s campaign should be understood at least in part in retaliatory terms, as directed at the political elite rather than at struggling minority groups. The Hell’s Angels, Thompson wrote, did things like get tattoos of swastikas mostly because it visibly scared the members of polite society. The Angels were perfectly happy to hang out at bars with men of different races, especially if those men drove motorcycles, and several insisted to Thompson that the racism was only for show. While I have no doubt (and no one should have any doubt) that there are genuine racists in Trump’s constituency—and the gleeful performance of racism is nothing to shrug off—Thompson suggests we should consider the ways in which racism might not be the core disease of Trumpism but a symptom of a deeper illness.

* * *

Thompson would also direct our attention in the early days of the Trump administration to the armed forces and the policies that will mandate what they do. For one great exception to the Angels’ ethos of total retaliation against authority was the military, just as one great exception to the Trump voters’ ethos of total irreverence is the police. Thompson explains that such institutions, which are premised on brute force rather than the more refined rules of intellectual engagement, maintain both a practical and a cultural connection to people like the Angels. The military and the police draw mostly from poor and working-class communities to fill their ranks, and their use of violence is something the motorcycle guys understand. It is one aspect of American life they can easily imagine themselves being a part of.

For his part, Thompson thought that what might prove most dangerous about the ethic of total retaliation was the way it encouraged the distrust of all authority—except for the authority of brute force. The president-elect’s enthusiasm for waterboarding and other forms of torture, his hawkish cabinet choices, and his overtures to strongmen like Vladimir Putin are grave omens. We could end up back where Thompson left off at the end of his book: the Angels, marching with the John Birch Society, on behalf of the Vietnam War.

At the end of Hell’s Angels, having spent months with the motorcycle guys, Thompson finally gets stomped by them. For some offense he doesn’t understand (and which he probably didn’t commit), Thompson gets punched, bloodied, kicked in the face and in the ribs, spat at and pissed on. He limps off to a hospital in the dead of night, alone and afraid. Only in that moment does Thompson realize that as a journalist (and therefore a member of the elite), he could not possibly be a true friend of the Angels. Wear leather and ride a motorcycle though he might, Thompson stood on the side of intellectual and cultural authority. And that finally made him, despite his months of good-timing with the Angels, subject to their retaliatory impulses. The ethic of retaliation is total, Thompson comes to realize. There is nothing partial about it. It ends with violence.

There’s no doubt about it: trouble lies ahead. That Hell’s Angels foresaw all this 50 years ago underscores the depth and seriousness of Thompson as a political thinker and of ours as a singularly dangerous time. Trumpism is about something far more serious than Trump, something that has been brewing and building for generations. Let us take Thompson’s cautions seriously, then, so that this time we Berkeley types are not naive about what we face. Otherwise, we’re all liable to get stomped.

Revolutionary Guard faces new foe in Iran's opening economy

By JON GAMBRELL  AP

Vahid Salemi The Progressive

In this Sept. 21, 2008 file photo, Iranian Revolutionary Guard members march during a parade ceremony, marking the 28th anniversary of the onset of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988),

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran's Revolutionary Guard faces a new enemy: the gradual opening of the country's economy after the nuclear deal with world powers.

Though better known for its hard-line fervor as an elite force created to defend Iran's cleric-led system, the Guard holds vast business interests both public and hidden across the Islamic Republic. In times of international sanctions, the organization won massive no-bid government contracts and expanded its influence.

But comments made by one Guard general about a new ship deal worth $650 million betray the worry felt in the organization over potential competition, analysts say. It also offers a possible secondary motive for its detention of dual nationals on purported espionage charges and its confrontations with the West: keeping its share of Iran's market of 80 million people.

"They are worried about competition internally," said Alireza Nader, an analyst at the RAND Corporation who long has studied the Guard. "They want to make sure for any given deal, they get a part of it."

Last Friday, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines Co. signed a deal with South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries for 10 container ships. It marked the first deal with a foreign shipbuilder since the nuclear accord that limited Iran's enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions.

For the state-owned shipping company, the $650 million deal is essential as much of its fleet is so aged that it cannot be insured. For Hyundai, it meant a foot in the door for potential future deals as the shipper plans to spend $2.5 billion in total to revamp its fleet.

Not everyone, however, was happy.

"At a time when we are faced with the problem of youth unemployment in our country, unfortunately, we have heard that the contract to build 10 ships has been signed with South Korea and I hope it is not true and it has not been signed yet," Guard Gen. Ebadollah Abdollahi said Sunday. "Is it a lack of respect for our domestic capabilities? If it is true, we request the president cancels this deal."

While President Hassan Rouhani's administration backs the ship deal, Abdollahi's comments reflect the dual roles of the Revolutionary Guard.

The Guard formed out of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution as a force meant to protect its Shiite-cleric-overseen government. It operated parallel to the country's regular armed forces, growing in prominence and power during the country's long and ruinous war with Iraq in the 1980s.

In the war's aftermath, authorities allowed the Guard to expand into private enterprise.

Today, it runs a massive construction company called Khatam al-Anbia, with 135,000 employees handling civil development, the oil industry and defense issues. Guard firms build roads, man ports, run telecommunication networks and even conduct laser eye surgery.

The exact scope of all its business holdings remains unclear, though analysts say they are sizeable. The Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has been critical of the nuclear deal, suggests the Guard controls "between 20 and 40 percent of the economy" of Iran through significant influence in at least 229 companies.

Among the Guard's firms is the Iran Marine Industrial Co., a ship building and repair company. The company, also known by the acronym SADRA, lost out on the contract, likely spurring Abdollahi's comments.

Hyundai Heavy Industries spokesman Kim Moon-joo declined to comment Tuesday whether the company was aware of Abdollahi's comments. Kim also declined to say whether the company had any concerns about taking business from a Guard-aligned company.

Part of the Guard's worry may stem from the oversized role it took on in Iran's economy during sanctions, said Afshon Ostovar, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in the United States who recently published book on the Guard.

"The door is open to doing deals with the West and they don't want those doors to be floodgates," Ostovar said. "They want them to be a tiny little window where very discrete, deliberate transactions happen but not just sort of a gold rush for both the West and for Iranians trying to make a buck."

"That's what makes them more nervous than anything else: losing control," Ostovar added.

Maintaining that control for the Guard has included detaining a series of dual nationals since the nuclear pact, causing concern among international businesses hoping for contracts with Tehran. It continues to confront U.S. Navy ships and aircraft traveling through the Persian Gulf, even as Chicago-based Boeing Co. has signed a $16.6 billion to sell aircraft to Iran.

For Rouhani, who likely will run for re-election in May, showing economic benefits from the nuclear deal remains key as its effects largely haven't trickled down to the average Iranian. He also has backed the Guard's military missions abroad to Syria and Iraq.

Meanwhile, at the back of everyone's mind is the health of Iran's aging Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a major benefactor of the Guard who relies on its support.

"The Guard wants to make sure the country doesn't change," Nader said. "I think their approach now is not to allow any sort of change, even small change. They worry small change can lead to very big demands."

___

Associated Press writer Youkyung Lee in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report.

THE AGE OF DONALD TRUMP AND PIZZAGATE

By Amy Davidson The New Yorker

Comet Ping Pong, a restaurant in Washington, D.C., has become the center of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.

When trying to understand what has befallen Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., over the past few weeks, should one start with the gun or with the lies? Both are durable; both are dangerous. The gun is an AR-15-style assault rifle that a man, reportedly a twenty-eight-year-old named Edgar Maddison Welch, carried into the restaurant on Sunday. According to press accounts, Welch waved the gun, pointed it at an employee, and then fired, thankfully not hitting anyone. Customers ran out; nearby businesses, including a bookstore, went into lock-down. The police managed to arrest Welch. He had another gun in his car, and he had a motive. He told the police that he had come to “self-investigate” a conspiracy theory, or set of theories, known as Pizzagate. These theories, which, most broadly put, place Hillary Clinton at the center of an international child-sex-trafficking ring, are the lies, and they are almost incomprehensible. The mystery within the mystery is how anybody with a shred of good will would even try to connect point A to point B. Foremost among those nonetheless doing so are Donald Trump-supporting social-media figures, including the son of retired General Michael Flynn, the President-elect’s choice for national-security adviser. (General Flynn himself hasn’t tweeted Pizzagate allegations, but he has tweeted stories about different pedophilia-related conspiracy theories, also supposedly entangling Clinton.)

The charge at the center of Pizzagate is this: Comet Ping Pong is where high-ranking Democrats go when they want pizza. But “pizza” is not pizza. It is a code word for sexually exploitable young girls, or maybe for young boys, or for infants trafficked from Haiti and killed for their organs, which are then trafficked further. And John Podesta talked about pizza in his e-mails, which were released by Wikileaks. He talked about pizza more than once. Again, it’s hard to know where to start—by asking what the proof is or by asking why anyone would ever posit these notions as something that needed proving or disproving. Often, conspiracy theories are grafted onto something that seems like a mystery, even if it’s not, such as the suicide of Vince Foster, who had worked with Hillary Clinton in Arkansas and joined her husband’s Administration. That human tragedy was exploited by the Clintons’ political opponents and spun into strange stories involving murder. Pizzagate lacks even that nub. There is nothing to explain—no missing children, no accusers, no break-ins involving intelligence agents, no odd incidents, no inexplicable phone calls from powerful people, no baseless firing of someone asking questions, no hit-and-run death of someone who knew too much. But if you find it odd that any given person in America would, now and again, want to eat pizza; if you think that it is suspicious that people getting together to watch something on TV would do so at a pizza place; if you think that the phrase “I could bring a pizza home” is so bizarre that it must mean something else; or if hearing that something is baked in “a pizza oven” causes you to envision Hansel-and-Gretel-like images of child murder with the possible involvement of international terrorists and money launderers (and that is one of the charges), then this is the conspiracy theory for you.

Here is why Pizzagaters say that all this matters, though it’s not clear why any of it would: Comet Ping Pong is owned by a man named James Alefantis. He was once involved with David Brock, a former right-wing journalist who became a Hillary Clinton supporter and worked to get her elected. Alefantis has e-mailed with Podesta, including once to tell him about an Obama fund-raiser taking place at the restaurant, and to ask if he might want to stop by and maybe have dinner. Comet Ping Pong has a haute-hipsterish decor, and a certain number of its clients are journalists or work in politics. It has Ping-Pong tables and displays an image of two Ping-Pong paddles on its menu; if you squint, they look like a butterfly, and a butterfly may or may not be an international symbol beckoning people who sexually abuse children. There may be a subterranean network of rooms and tunnels beneath the restaurant that are used for imprisonment, trafficking, and other unspeakable things. (Alefantis told the BBC, “We don’t even have a basement.”) There is also an e-mail thread in which it is strongly suggested that Podesta may have once had a map that showed where to find pizza on Martha’s Vineyard. (So not only in Washington!) The authorities are, allegedly, covering it all up. These suppositions have been embroidered on and combined with other fabrications in long threads on Reddit, 4Chan, and elsewhere. (BuzzFeed has mapped out how the theory spread.) There is no real search for “truth,” only what amounts to conspiracy fan-fiction. The only actual threat to children seems to have come from Pizzagaters who, according to press reports, have collected pictures of children on the Instagram and Facebook pages of people who “liked” Comet Ping Pong’s pages, then republished them as identifying putative victims. The threats to families—to Alefantis and his staff, and to people in businesses nearby (who have been accused of, among other things, being linked to the ring via the tunnel network)—have become frequent and, as the events of this weekend indicate, have moved beyond the realm of fantasy.

On Sunday night, after the man with the gun walked into the restaurant, General Flynn’s son tweeted, “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it’ll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many ‘coincidence’ tied to it.” But this makes about as much sense as demanding that Comet Ping Pong prove that it is not the secret base of space aliens who are plotting to take over the world through their agents in the Democratic Party. Indeed, by some measures it makes less sense. (“Comet Ping Pong” is at least a plausible code name for interstellar travel. And do you know who talks unironically about U.F.O.s? John Podesta.)

Pizzagate seems to have really taken hold during the Presidential campaign, in the period after the release of an “Access Hollywood” video that showed Trump bragging about grabbing the genitals of women he had just met. He dismissed the comments by calling them “locker-room talk,” and by bringing up allegations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton. Trump’s supporters went farther, attempting to turn both Clintons into sex-crime monsters. The Washington City Paper, in a look at Pizzagate a few days before the election, offered the view that, when Podesta’s e-mails were publicized, some Trump supporters hoped that they would provide the ingredients to substantiate such a scandal. But all they found was pizza, and pizza would have to do.

Which is more alarming: the idea that Pizzagate is being promoted by politically motivated cynics who don’t actually believe it, or that people with influence and proximity to power, including people with access to the President-elect, are really susceptible to this sort of nonsense? Both can be the case; fabricators and wide-eyed believers can be side by side, in Twitter feeds or Trump Tower, or, soon, in the White House. Many things are likely to go wrong for Trump and to disappoint his supporters. The fear is that he and they will try to explain his failings by pushing conspiracy theories of all kinds. The spirit of Pizzagate could become as commonplace, in this country, as the smell of pizza. And how does one even measure power and influence in the context of social media, or, for that matter, in a country with few effective gun-control laws and a President-elect who got crowds cheering with talk of armed citizens taking down terrorists in crowded cafés? How much power belongs to a man in his twenties walking into a pizza place with an assault rifle, looking for secret chambers and hidden messages?