Politics & Power Quote by Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson isn’t praising McGovern so much as indicting everyone else who ever wandered into a campaign handshake line. The word “monument” is doing sneaky double duty: it’s an aspirational image of America as a towering, public work of moral imagination, and it’s also a reminder that monuments are built choices - expensive, intentional, and meant to outlast the petty people who commissioned them. In Thompson’s hands, that’s a dare. If the United States could be a “monument … to the human race,” then most presidents of the twentieth century, by implication, settled for being managers of an empire, caretakers of the status quo, or salesmen for national mythology.

The line works because it’s both utopian and bitterly procedural. Thompson, the patron saint of political disillusionment, isn’t naïve about America; he’s furious at how small its leaders’ imaginations are. McGovern becomes a vessel for an America that might have been: less paranoid, less militarized, less addicted to “toughness” as a substitute for ethics. That subtext is inseparable from Vietnam and the Cold War’s moral contortions. McGovern, a decorated WWII veteran who opposed Vietnam, threatened the era’s bipartisan consensus that global power automatically equaled virtue.

There’s also Thompson’s signature trick: radical hope framed as a backhanded compliment. He elevates McGovern to expose the emptiness of the field. The romance is real; the cynicism is the method.