Consider the sieg-heiling. When Elon Musk threw up his arm at President Trump’s second inauguration, the hot takes started rolling in. Was it a Nazi salute? Was it not? Did it reveal Musk to be a white supremacist? Autistic? Just a jerk? In a world filled with controversies, this one merited its own Wikipedia page. And while everyone’s thoughts flailed every which way, I thought of the Hells Angels. This was their kind of shit. They would have loved it.
In 1965, after spending almost two years with the Hells Angels, Hunter S. Thompson issued a warning to the United States. The warning wasn’t about the Angels themselves, or about the other motorcycle clubs they inspired. The warning wasn’t about the drug culture, which the Angels were rushing to exploit. The warning wasn’t about American journalism, which Thompson loved to bash for its superficiality and sensationalism.
Thompson’s warning was much bigger and more dire than any of that. His warning was about the rise of a new politics on the American right: a politics of “total retaliation.” Starting with an article in The Nation, Thompson insisted that the Hells Angels were more than cultural outlaws. They were a cultural omen.
Eight years ago, just after Donald Trump’s first election to the presidency, I wrote my own article for The Nation, arguing that Thompson’s account of the Angels predicted MAGA. Although I’ve never been less happy to have an argument hold up, I think that argument does. Today, with Trump reinstalled in the White House, I want to revisit what Thompson says about total-retaliation politics. I don’t think there are many better guides to what has been happening, and what might happen yet.
All-American Anomie
Thompson’s bird’s-eye view is this: the conventional story about postwar America is wrong. The conventional story—what ChatGPT will tell you today—is that the United States, after World War II, grew into prosperity, expanded civil rights, and became a global superpower. Thompson tells another story: after World War II, the nation lost a sense of mission, so much so that President Eisenhower had to create a Commission on National Goals to figure one out. In this “society where even the highest authorities seem[ed] to be grasping at straws,” alienation started to take hold. “America,” says Thompson, “has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II.”
“America,” says Thompson, “has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II.”
There are different ways to respond to alienation, especially when new money is changing hands and new technology is changing everything. Some people will respond in a constructive spirit, trying to work together to improve the status quo. They act constructively because they can envision a transformed status quo in which they share in making the rules (or the money, or the tech).
But not everyone is able to envision themselves that way. So other people will chomp at what one Angel called the “destructive bit”—and dream of burning everything down. These people are not “visionaries,” says Thompson. They are “diehards.”
There are different ways to respond to alienation. Some people will respond in a constructive spirit, trying to work together to improve the status quo. Other people will chomp at what one Angel called the “destructive bit”—and dream of burning everything down.
Thompson’s ground-level view is this: try to understand what it feels like, to feel like a loser. Try to understand what it feels like to have blown all your options or had all your options blown. Try to understand what it feels like, to know the fact of your losing but not the reason for it. Try to understand that anger and desperation and shame. Try to understand the “paradox” of that position, that “a man who has blown all his options can’t afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can’t afford to admit—no matter how often he’s reminded of it—that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley.”
Then: Try to imagine how good it feels, when you find others who get you—and attach force to your feelings. Try to imagine how good it feels, just to get some attention.
This, Thompson says, is how you start to understand the Hells Angels: their cultic insularity, their self-destructiveness, their vindictiveness, their nihilism, their attraction to strongmen, their love of spectacle, their joyous rejection of civility and social norms. (Today, on the Hells Angels’ website, the group acknowledges that “Hells” has an apostrophe missing. But “it is you who miss it. We don’t.”). Thompson put it best:
Most Angels understand where they are, but not why, and they are well enough grounded in the eternal verities to know that very few of the toads in this world are Charming Princes in disguise. Most are simply toads, and no matter how many magic maidens they kiss or rape, they are going to stay that way … Toads don’t make laws or change any basic structures, but one or two rooty insights can work powerful changes in the way they get through life. A toad who believes he got a raw deal before he even knew who was dealing will usually be sympathetic to the mean, vindictive ignorance that colors the Hells Angels’ view of humanity. There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.
This is also how you start to understand how a politics of total retaliation might emerge. “If they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything,” Thompson writes, the Hells Angels are the vanguard of “a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that ‘outlaws’ like the Hells Angels have been finding for years.” In the last decade, that legion has found an outlet in MAGA.
Total Retaliation: Society without Restraint
Most of the Hells Angels were—like most of MAGA’s key constituency are—working-class young men. Thompson was good at understanding working-class young men and the quality of their alienation in a rapidly globalizing, technologizing society. He cautioned that a failure to tend to the inner lives of working-class young men would be a great failure, indeed—as the Democratic Party is finding out.
But Thompson also understood that even if the Angels were mostly a working-class-young-man phenomenon, the Angels weren’t merely a working-class-young-man phenomenon, and I suspect he would say something similar about MAGA. For Thompson saw, concealed in all the pearl-clutching about the Angels, deeper feelings of envy and desire. Thompson says that there is a little part in each of us—call it ego, call it sin, call it evil, call it whatever—that fantasizes about breaking things and doing whatever we want. And in a culture of growing alienation, that part of us gets louder. Two weeks ago, a friend—a southern-Californian, Birkenstock-wearing massage therapist—told me, “I’m ready to see some things burn down.” She advised me to stock up on ammo.
Total-retaliation politics taps into the part of each of us that chafes at civilizational restraint.
Total-retaliation politics doesn’t just tap into the desire for revenge against a cultural and political elite—the desire to “own the libs.” Total-retaliation politics taps into the part of each of us that chafes at civilizational restraint. Total-retaliation politics vibes with Rousseau’s assertion that “man is born free, but everywhere is in chains.” Total-retaliation politics doesn’t wield a scalpel or a hammer. It wields, like Musk, a chainsaw.
In that, like the French Revolution that Rousseau’s words helped bring into being, the politics of total retaliation risks throwing out the baby and the bathtub when draining the water (or, erm, the swamp). The politics of total retaliation feeds on “random revenge” and, when unleashed, is hard even for its champions to contain. As Thompson learned when the Angels beat him up, even its allies can be targets.
The politics of total retaliation are very different from the postliberal politics championed by Patrick Deneen, among others. It is telling that Deneen recently complained (via tweet) that Musk and his team at DOGE “lack political vision.” But Deneen does not seem to understand that he and Musk are not playing the same game; in total-retaliation politics, the lack of vision is part of the point.
And while it may seem curious that two billionaires—Trump and Musk—are the faces of MAGA, Thompson makes it make sense. Billionaires have so much money that they can do almost whatever they want and probably get away with it. Billionaires embody the total-retaliation fantasy of a life without civilizational restraint. They are living the dream. With their money, they’ve beaten the system, or broken it.
Horror sans Meaning
Consider, again, the sieg-heiling. The Angels did that before it was cool, or at least before it was streamed. Many of them had swastikas sewn on their jackets or tattooed on their arms. At the time, it generated controversy. Were they actual Nazis? Were they maybe just ordinary racists?
When Thompson asks some of the Angels about this, they shrug him off. They say they don’t think about that stuff much, but those swastikas sure get attention. Racism isn’t the point. Capturing other people’s attention—breaking their brains—is the point.
The politics of total-retaliation are brain-breaking politics. Total-retaliation politics thrills at divorcing words and symbols from meanings— “he didn’t really mean what he said,” or “he didn’t really mean what you say that gesture means”—because doing so breaks down language. That is, it breaks down the basic tool that enables law and politics and, like, civilization.
The politics of total-retaliation are brain-breaking politics. They thrill at divorcing words and symbols from meanings.
Thompson says: it would be easier if we were merely dealing with racists. He ends Hells Angels with a warning from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “The horror! The horror!”
Susan McWilliams Barndt is a professor of politics at Pomona College. She is the author, most recently, of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought.
Image made by Aaron Irion using “Elon Musk” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic; “Hells Angels Motorcycle Club Patches,” by FinestSkydiver licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
