A 1970 Campaign Message for 2022
Recently walking through the Barnes and Nobles in Mishawaka, Indiana, I was pleasantly surprised to run across three different books by the Good Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, stocked under Current Affairs no less! Such are times when you briefly think... well, it makes you smile anyway, some people will be learning while having a laugh.
I used to say the Doctor was crazily prescient, but it's a word I've grown to not much care for. Webster's defines prescience: “a foreknowledge of events.” There's no such thing. However, there is a looking at the present without blinders, nakedly, seeing events for what they are, with an understanding if there is no change in direction, the direction will not change.
The Good Doctor stared unblinkingly – always, always with humor – at America in the last half of the 20th century, with a belief it could be changed, in part by rediscovering what the republic sought to be at our best. He saw the American political system by the late 1960s in deep, dark trouble. He wrote, “The proof of our failure is the wreckage of Jefferson's dream that haunts us on every side from coast to coast.”
Thompson became politically enfranchised and radicalized covering the 1968 Democratic Convention, where the Chicago police rioted on anti-war demonstrators. Thompson stated, “I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast.”
After Chicago, in his new home outside Aspen, he encouraged and then ran the Mayoral campaign of a young civil liberties attorney. They lost by six votes, but Thompson learned American electoral politics from its foundation. In a wonderful piece titled “The Battle of Aspen,” Thompson writes, “We had run the whole campaign from a long oaken table in the Jerome Tavern on Main Street, working flat out in public so any one could see or even join if they felt ready.”
And a lesson still needing to be learned again in again in America about elections, Thompson writes about calling the District Attorney to complain about their opponents' election tactics in regards to various “voter intimidation” statutes. The D.A replied, “Leave me out of it; police your own elections.”
It was not random that Thompson ran for sheriff the next year. County Sheriff is one of the oldest local offices in Anglo-American governance, one of the first elected offices in the new American colonies. However, by 1970, local government had largely been disenfranchised. Over two-hundred years, the republic's political and economic power became increasingly monopolized in Washington DC and in the board rooms of leviathan corporations. “We are reaping the whirlwind, big city problems too malignant for small-town solutions,” the Doctor stated.
In David Halberstam's wonderful history of the incompetence of unaccountable DC expertise, The Best and the Brightest, he tells the story of the then new Vice-President Lyndon Johnson gushing to his mentor House Speaker Sam Rayburn about his first cabinet meeting and all the smart men – the best and the brightest — the new president had gathered around him. Rayburn replied, “Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”
In an interview before the sheriff’s election, Thompson said his purpose was, “Not only a new kind of sheriff, but a whole new style of government, the kind of thing Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he talked about democracy.”
The Doctor's experience in running for sheriff proved immensely useful in his future writings about American politics. It's dumbfounding how much is written about politics in this country with no understanding of the election system. Even more amazing how many who actually consider themselves in politics know little to nothing about electoral politics, but then electoral politics today is not much more than marketing and advertising – a business. The Doctor's gained foundational knowledge of the American election process made his writings on politics always smart. His 1972 book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, is the best ever on big time presidential election politics.
In an early ad in the Aspen Times, the doctor laid out the “Freak Power” sheriff's platform including:
“Sod the streets at once. Rip up all city streets with jackhammers and use the junk asphalt (after melting) to create a huge auto storage and parking lot on the outskirts of town.”
“Change the name of Aspen by public referendum to “Fat City.” This would prevent greed heads, land-rapers, and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name of “Aspen.”
“Drug sales must be controlled.”
“The Sheriff and his deputies should never be armed in public.”
Not prescience, but looking nakedly, desperately, and amusingly at the world he lived. In a very amusing, though deadly serious campaign, Thompson shaved his head before the debates so he could refer to the flat-topped incumbent sheriff as, “My long-haired opponent.”
The campaign registered eight-hundred new voters in a county of seven-thousand people, but on election night came up short. The Republican and Democratic establishment worked together to combine their votes for the incumbent against an insurgent candidacy they feared. Hunter describes the vote, “The GOP candidate got about 150 votes—after the party abandoned him massively, by means of a huge telephone campaign on election eve, and avoiding that three way split we were counting on. In the other (County Commissioner) race, the Democrats abandoned their candidate and swung massively to the GOP incumbent, producing the same kind of tally. Against us.”
Another very relevant lesson for today. Any real campaign for change in America would quickly see our supposedly hopelessly divided political establishment quickly find common ground in defense of the status quo.
It was no accident that Thompson's political awakening occurred in the streets of Chicago amongst the opposition to a senseless war that would continue another seven years. Years later before his death, the bloody irony was not lost on the Good Doctor that as that generation in the streets of Chicago, who did everything they could personally do not to fight in Vietnam, came to power, they started and supported one senseless war after another.
In the last ad of his sheriff race, Thompson summed up the Freak Power slogan as, “A crude but super-effective piece of political theatre which worked too well, so now is time to bury it and move on.” The Doctor then restated the campaign's real and serious as hell message, “The task of returning local government to the people who live in this valley, instead of the greed heads—and their local agents—who only want to invest here.” A spot-on message for all candidates today.
The Doctor lost, the greed heads won. In 2021, the average home sale in Aspen was $9.5 million, a holiday getaway for the world's super-rich. At the same time, the same party that battled the anti-war demonstrators in the streets of Chicago, continues warmongering across the globe.
God love the Good Doctor Thompson