Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail '72

“When a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.”

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 investigates politics as though politics were an addictive substance. Like an addict craving a fix, Hunter S. Thompson presents his narrative as the culmination of his descent into an addiction to political journalism. Only someone who has had this addiction, he suggests, can explain it. The Gonzo qualities of his coverage foreground his own experiences and addictive proximity to politics, emphasizing the importance of his subjective authority as someone who has “Been There.”

“There is no way to avoid ‘racist undertones’ here.”

Thompson begins his coverage with a description of the changing racial demographics of Washington, DC. Throughout the book, he criticizes Richard Nixon’s racism, while not recognizing the implicit racism (at least, from a modern perspective) in his own comments. In doing so, he hints at a subtle similarity between himself and Nixon that emerges over the rest of the narrative. No matter how much Thompson claims to loathe the president, there is something of Thompson in Nixon and vice versa.