We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

For many, Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide on February 20, 2005 signaled the end of an era. For veteran hippies now hopelessly ensnared by debts and obligations in the workings of the straight world, he represented one of the last few uncorrupted practitioners of their old faith, a man who succeeded without ever giving up the sacred lifestyle. For older Blue-staters, his demise represented the death of an unashamedly anti-Republican voice just when their side needs one most. Hunter could with little effort be more devastating than the most rabid shouting head found on Fox News today. “If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral,” the good Dr. Thompson wrote in Rolling Stone Magazine in 1994, “his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president.”

Yet in reading all the obituaries, one feels the need to rescue Hunter S. Thompson from his most ardent supporters, much like one feels the need to free George Orwell from the coddling arms of Cold Warriors like Norman Podhoretz. Sure, Thompson loathed Richard Nixon and ingested vast amounts of drugs. But he had choice words for Hubert Humphrey in 1967 (“a shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack”), and said of then front-runner Ed Muskie in 1973 that “he talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next years’ crop.” He was a gun enthusiast, and believed that America’s failures in Vietnam were the work of “cowardly faggots and spies.” And most tellingly, he described the counterculture movement of the 60s as “a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody — or at least some force — is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.”

It’s this last insight which motivated much of Hunter’s vitriol. He was, after all, one of these very same permanent cripples and failed seekers who, upon waking up in a stupor in a trashed Las Vegas hotel room, slowly come to realize that their movement failed to change anything essential about America or the world. He was arguably the first among the American left to see the emptiness of his own stance, founded as it was in a naive idea that it was somehow self-justifying.

Subsequently, he did all he could the only way he knew how: by writing. He eviscerated his enemies for being craven and evil, and berated his allies for not being good enough. Like Nietzsche’s madman, he drunkenly staggered through the streets, announcing to all who would listen that the progressive ideals were dead, that they were but an illusion of a happier time. Something had to be done, the other side was organizing. But perhaps he, too, had come too soon; the leftist establishment wouldn’t realize how intellectually barren their side had become until more than 30 years later, thanks to the humbling re-election of George W. Bush.

Thompson clearly enjoyed crafting sharp sentences and carefully infusing each one with just the right mixture of venom and humor. Writing must have been like a salve against feelings of helplessness and depression. But 30 years of staring into the void had to have taken their toll. Writing as medicine became less potent. “I suspect writing is a bit like fucking,” he once wrote, “which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling.”

A version of this article appeared in the SAIS Observer, the student-run monthly newspaper of the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies.