Hunter S Thompson’s freaks have overrun America

The pioneer of gonzo chronicled his people’s wild descent – and saw what his country has now become

In the early Seventies, America looked to be all played out. The postwar industrial boom that powered its golden age of capitalism was starting to run trade deficits, civil unrest was destabilising communities, individualism was undermining generational solidarity, and a mean conservative reaction was forming against Sixties social liberalism. Together, these forces were unpicking the mythologies that had held the country together for decades.

Hunter S Thompson emerged inside this disintegrating centrifuge just when he was needed, to interpret the fissile debris and make sense of the whole goddamn thing. He was the cudgel-observer on the front line of the US’s last conjunctural moment – the transition from one political period to another. He bridged the Washington political elite with the hippies and dropouts who formed the “freak turn” that he hoped would drive a revolutionary moment. And he was just as mired in the dirt as everyone else – pothead and politico.

Just as Thompson was obsessed with America, America can’t shake its obsession with Thompson. In October 2025, investigators said they would “review” the circumstances of his death 21 years ago at the request of his widow, despite the original, and uncontroversial, conclusion that his death was a suicide by gunshot to the head. The review appears to be ongoing. In death, as in life, Thompson and America continue to interrogate the mystery of each other.

Thompson’s reputation as a writer was made by an immersive form of reportage that he stumbled onto at the Kentucky Derby in 1970, “far gone in a pill-stupor”. After witnessing the depths of American degeneracy at that most Southern of sporting events, Thompson wrote a bizarre but captivating report 7,000 words long, of which only two short sentences dealt with the horse race itself. The rest amounted to an intoxicated paranoiac’s desperation “to see the whisky gentry in action”. The article caused a sensation and was, according to a friend, “pure gonzo”.

In “gonzo” writing, the author’s sensory reactions, impressions and literary style rode roughshod over the facts of the story. The idea was that a disregard for conventional “truth” would illumine deeper truths otherwise hidden from the orthodox gaze; to, in his words, “eliminate the steps between the writer and the page”. And it was a “spirit” embodied in his work only, to set himself apart from the New Journalists and other writers of the time. Thompson “hate[d] to write, I really despise[d] the work”; it was worth it only for the moments of “pure gonzo breakthrough”.

Its tightest expression was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), in which Thompson’s alter ego Raoul Duke and his “attorney” go on a quest to find the American Dream by covering a motorcycle race in Las Vegas. It is still by far Thompson’s most popular work, and gonzo still forms Thompson’s most popular image. He is remembered with a visor and a cigarette holder, brutish and cruel, a boozer, a smoker, and a drug fiend. He was all those things; “I like drugs,” he told Playboy in 1974, “why should I deny it?” The silhouette was defined by Johnny Depp’s gurning portrayal of Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing’s 1997 film adaptation. But while the movie captured Thompson’s gurgling delivery and the oozing, gratuitous psychedelia of the novel, it wasn’t able to transpose the portrayal of the US’s political absurdity that, however disguised, guided Thompson’s literary approach.

Thompson’s favourite fix was no drug, but politics. He loved the support shifts, the horse-trading, the cut-through of presidential gaffes, once describing himself as a “political junkie” for whom the “combination of power and adrenaline… beats any drug I’ve found yet”. His self-proclaimed “aggressive ignorance” about politics belied a deep interest in and understanding of the tectonics of power. This fascination furnished his writing with a lucidity and immediacy that made him an outstanding analyst – yet one who is somehow underrated for his grasp of politics.

[Further reading: Gore Vidal: American prophet]

After Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas confirmed Thompson’s willingness to thrust himself into the heart of the American conflagration, he landed a permanent gig at the relatively new Rolling Stone. He later became national affairs correspondent. The “Fear and Loathing in…” moniker became a regular prefix to the seething clarity of Thompson’s political reporting. This was where his admixture of courage and folly allowed him to observe the mass hysteria of US politics – then channel the resulting fume into incisive political commentary. It was in those pages that the essays later collected into Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973) first appeared. With the balance between gonzo energy and genuine reporting at its illuminating best, he covered the 1972 presidential election campaign “as close to the bone as I could get”.

His close following of the Democratic underdog George McGovern paid off when the candidate’s anti-Vietnam position and promise to reduce defence spending miraculously impelled him to victory in the party’s primary – despite establishment Democrat attempts to undermine his nomination, which Thompson termed “one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the Democratic process”. McGovern, who is still perhaps the most left-wing presidential candidate since the Second World War, was a favourite of what Thompson declared the “Freak vote”, the assortment of “dope-fiends, anarchists, and Big-Beat dropouts” held over from the narcotic and rebellious experimentation of the previous decade. McGovern, Thompson thought, understood “what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon”.

McGovern’s loss to Nixon in 1972 was not Thompson’s first political beating. His perspective had been transformed decisively four years earlier, when he was tear-gassed and threatened by club-wielding police at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention after the circus was upstaged by violent riots, despite his accreditation as a journalist. Thompson returned seething, “a raving beast”, and desperate to avert the “rotten fascist context of what was happening in America”. He believed active commitment in the democratic process was required. The gentle Colorado city of Aspen, where he moved to in 1967, with its unusual blend of hippies and conservatives, was the perfect place to implement a small-town political revolution.

Thompson became the campaign manager for Joe Edwards’ “Freak Power” candidacy for mayor in 1969. Thompson was furious at the greed exhibited in the local government’s over-development of the semi-rural valley. He denounced the city’s developers as “greedheads” and “land-rapers”, and called for the town to be renamed Fat City to discourage the “human jackals from capitalising” on its forests and mountains. Thompson ran the Edwards campaign from a “long oaken table” in a tavern “working flat out in public so anyone could see or even join if they felt ready”. They lost by six votes. This anti-system, freak constituency could “goddamn well control [our country] if we learn to use the tools”, Thompson wrote in a letter.

Encouraged by how close Edwards was to winning, Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County – which includes Aspen and its surrounding valleys – a year later. On the same Freak Power ticket, his policies ranged from ripping up the streets and replacing car transport with bicycles, to putting dishonest drug dealers in the stocks because “no drug worth taking should be sold for money”, to disarming police because street violence was usually down to “some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy”. He also cut his hair off so he could refer to his Democratic rival in debates as “my long-haired opponent”.

This might have seemed a satire of politics, populism as a joke, but Thompson was very serious. “There is common sense in the apparent madness of my campaign,” he told an audience ahead of polling day. “I am not running for sheriff in the traditional sense, but to help get hold of our destiny and begin controlling development.” He wouldn’t try to force changes, but encourage referendums and create a legal advisory board of lawyers to sit with select citizens to consult with the sheriff’s department. “We either have a participating democracy or a police state.” He wanted to rethink the concept of the office, “to put the dormant power of the office to work” and to use it in conjunction with other authorities to help improve people’s lives. Though this was certainly anti-establishment, it was also agitation for change from within the system: an attempt to lead an electoral revolution by consensus rather than minority acts of violence. To Thompson, a “freak” was “not a beast roaming the streets chewing drugs, but someone who is spiritually disenfranchised, who has not wanted to participate in government”.

His hope that the freaks could replace the proletariat as agents of political and social revolution, however, was disabused. First, he lost his election by 17 points after the Republican pulled out, sluicing all the square votes to the Democrat. Then, McGovern was crushed in the final 1972 presidential vote by Richard Nixon. The freaks seemed to have missed their moment in that 1969-72 period. Near the beginning of On the Campaign Trail, Thompson writes hopefully of the “youth vote”, the “most committed, the most idealistic” generation yet. Even if only 10 per cent of a potential 25 million new voters voted against Nixon, that would be enough “to swing almost any election”. But under-thirties in 1972 went 52-48 against McGovern. The freaks and the youth hardly constituted a cogent class; their political objectives varied too wildly to lead America with a “fresh vision”, as McGovern wished. Many of the freaks also didn’t vote. As Thompson says anecdotally, half the people he knew didn’t turn out in 1972.

Thompson was deeply depressed by McGovern’s failure, and was unwilling to file the five-page election feature Rolling Stone had set aside for the final wrap-up. In despair, he wrote that it was finally time for America to face up to the fact “that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable”. McGovern made mistakes in his campaign, yet they seemed “almost frivolous compared to the things Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy”. For Thompson, Nixon’s ascendance represented not only the failure of the freak movement but the infiltration of a new grasping, grotesque social attitude in the US. It was part of a “pendulum effect” he identified: “After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavioural sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion.” Nixon’s impeachment and resignation in 1974 over the Watergate scandal exemplified this. (Thompson said he was in the bar of the Watergate building on the night it was broken into – “Of course, I missed the whole thing.”)

Thompson’s individualism, his belief in the generative properties of alienation, his fascination with the venality of power, and his retreat into Aspen Americana in later years feels at odds with the community spirit and citizen participation required to realise the ascendancy of the collective good, to expand civil rights, and to maximise democratic involvement. Thompson described Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a “vile epitaph for the Drug Culture of the Sixties”. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and McGovern’s failure could equally be described as an epitaph for the political idealism of the Sixties. “Unfortunately,” Thompson said in his 1970 concession speech, “I proved what I set out to prove… that the American Dream really is fucked.”

Nixon’s removal from the White House was shadowed by Thompson’s slide towards irrelevance. His work came to be typified more by unreliability than whipcrack observation (he went to Vietnam for Rolling Stone but spent most of his time in a hotel drinking and never filed; he interviewed Jimmy Carter then lost the tapes), and his adventurism fell into inactivity. His published works, the Gonzo Papers volumes one to four (1979-94), were collections of columns, short stories, parts of stories, letters – written scraps, in other words, coherent only in their incoherence. He advertised cigarette filters and indulged in the type of cruel, pointless pranks that only acquire a rosy glint when recounted through the lazy nomenclature of “literary genius” – such as spraying people with mace in restaurants, or playing the screams of a wounded pig through a megaphone one night at Jack Nicholson and his scared children. Substance abuse is often cited as a reason for this slow decline, but perhaps it was also the political failure of his era and the arrival of a new one – neoliberalism, Reagan’s somnambulant conservatism, the unleashing of credit consumerism – that blunted the edge of his screeds.

There’s a sense with Thompson that he was an unwitting victim of his own literary success. As new political periods emerged, his celebrity hinged on its surface qualities – people loved the immediacy of his writing style, and loved to laugh at the expressive absurdity of his lifestyle. And they forgot, or chose not to remember, the sincerity of his belief in political change that powered his best work. Thompson played up this aspect of his legacy more than anyone else. Look at the cover photo for Gonzo Papers, Volume 3: Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream (1990): he crouches, pointing a handgun at a typewriter. It’s his cynicism – admittedly, an exquisite, formidable cynicism – which is celebrated today.

That hazy Thompsonian surface, that blurring of truth and fiction, helped create the media landscape that produced a leader like Donald Trump. Though there is no explicit relationship between them – and Thompson would likely have weighed Trump as contemptuously as he did Nixon – the Maga pyrotechnics of visceral communication, liberal provocation, and a willingness to bend reality to fit their presentation of facts aren’t all that far from gonzo – gonzo as a “spirit” that broadcasts varnished truths. This has also allowed Maga to colonise Thompson’s freak vote. If in 1972 those alienated youths, conspiracy theorists and dissenters from authority pulled themselves on to electoral rolls for the “far out” ideas of McGovern, that same demographic now follows Trump. And from their pockets of the internet they arbitrate the new age of the crank.

Yet Hunter S Thompson’s diagnosis of the psychology of America also allows us to understand today’s US administration in a longer national context – a country that, as we know in the age of Trump, swerves erratically between deal-making, sabre-rattling and regime-changing, that is as susceptible to imperialism as it is to isolationism. His work shows us that, rather than a bronze aberration in the otherwise unblemished advancement of US liberal democracy, the current president and his Maga-world are just another little punt further up the field to the goal line of American extremism.

[Further reading: Europe’s American Dream has become a nightmare]