Donald Trump is not the first crooked salesman to seek and attain the US presidency; not by a long shot. The first one I had any experience with was Richard Nixon, who might even have been worse. One of the best writers of that era was Hunter S. Thompson. In 1972, the Democratic candidate opposing Nixon (of course a Republican) was George McGovern. McGovern was not a particularly good candidate, and wasn’t mounting a great campaign in September, ’72, when Thompson wrote this:
The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states.
Well … maybe so. This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves: finally just lay back and say it — 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.
The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about “new politics” and “honesty in government”, is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands 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 made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.
We have more people now, but are we still just a nation of hundreds of millions of used car salesmen? We’re certainly a nation that’s more cruel, more venal, and more focused on greed than I, at least, used to hope. Maybe the greed isn’t entirely our fault; it’s instilled in us from birth, after all. So many of us are right where Margaret Thatcher was when she said (and I’m sure really believed) about capitalism that “there is simply no alternative.” There is, of course, and I’m not talking about communism. But when you’re a fish in the ocean it’s hard to see alternatives to water.
You might say that we “survived the Nixon years.” But did we, really? The US was not the same place after Nixon. Each generation, as they reach the age when they can vote, might start thinking about that, the consequences, and the responsibilities. There was a generation including me (I wasn’t old enough to vote yet) that went through that with Nixon, and — we —were not the same afterward. We had seen the elevation of a greedy little hustler with no redeeming qualities. That experience extinguished some of the trust and hope that should be the birthright of young people. We may have survived, but we were not unchanged.
Read Hunter S. Thompson to get some of the flavors of disillusion and disappointment and rage back then; those have never gone away, and now if anything they’re back with a vengeance. By the way, there’s at least one person writing today who captures the day in a way that reminds me a great deal of Thompson: Catherynne M. Valente. She’s more of a novelist where Thompson was more of a newspaperman, but read her newsletter Garbagetown for commentary that’s so on-point that, like Thompson’s work, it’s cathartic. In one of those weird things that emotions can do, you’ll feel worse in a way that will make you feel better.
