Moby-Dick and the United States of Aggrievement

Like the white whale itself, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) seems ubiquitous across time. For nearly a century, readers have turned to Captain Ahab’s search for the whale that took his leg to understand American crises. During the Cold War, commentators debated Ahab’s Stalin-like powers. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the question of vengeance took center stage. Was Ahab Mohammad Attah crashing an American Airlines jet into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, or was he George W. Bush searching for weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency offers a different question about Melville, domination, and US political life: How do Americans gain power by claiming that they have been wronged? Trump continues to shatter political norms, but complaining about mistreatment is part of the nation’s DNA. As erratic and self-indulgent as it may be, Trump’s sense of injury stretches back to the series of grievances that the Declaration of Independence itemized about King George III.

The first Trump administration cultivated comparisons to Andrew Jackson, the populist president whose election proclaimed the rise of the self-determined white man. Look behind the myths of Jacksonian democracy, however, and you will find a nation of teeming resentments. A nineteenth-century visitor observed that Americans had an unusual fondness for lawsuits and cheerfully took each other to court. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that while Americans were initially difficult to insult, their resentments, once ignited, took a long time to burn out. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously begrudged every dollar he gave to charity as an infringement on his “manhood” and individuality.

Against this backdrop Melville imagined Captain Ahab’s ruinous quest. The feeling of perpetual grievance animates the captain’s violent path through the world. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” he tells Starbuck, warning the First Mate that power resides in collecting real and imagined wounds. Ahab seems so difficult to resist because the crew believe that in seeking retribution for his injuries, they will get justice for their own. Historian Timothy Snyder has used the phrase “anticipatory obedience” to describe the way populations capitulated to twentieth-century authoritarians without being asked or forced. Melville depicted this phenomenon a decade before the Civil War. Starbuck openly challenges Ahab’s desire for revenge, but with profound dread, he feels himself already succumbing to the captain’s “lurid woe.”

It is hardly surprising that the authoritarian-loving Trump employs the language of vengeance that Moby-Dick so brilliantly explores: “I am your justice,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” Trying to explain Trump’s appeal, pundits have identified multiple resentments among the white working class, but they should look deeper into his supporters’ belief that, long before the assassination attempts, he had been flagrantly wronged. Trump is a convicted felon, an accused sexual predator, a billionaire who ignores bills, accountability, and the most basic laws. For decades, he has ruined people’s lives with relish rather than remorse. And yet, from the oligarchs of Silicon Valley to the sycophants of Fox News, our politics seems addicted to the idea that Trump has been persecuted, cheated, and dispossessed.

Homer’s Iliad tells the story of Achilles, whose damaged pride leaves him sulking in his tent and refusing to join the Greek siege of Troy. For all his self-pity, though, Achilles does not convince his fellow warriors to withdraw their armies from the fight. His resentments remain his own. Melville recognized that in the turbulent world of American democracy, aggrievement was a powerful political tool. Seconds before he throws his final harpoon, Ahab exclaims what we might regard as a recipe for the “irresistible dictatorship” he exerts over the crew: “Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.” 

Let me be clear: Ahab is too elevated, expressive, and philosophically self-aware to be explained by the MAGA movement. And yet, amid all his heroic complexity, the seeds of American aggrievement appear throughout his quest. When he inspires the harpooners, humiliates Starbuck, or tricks his crew, he revels in his own autocratic powers. Think of Trump nursing his bruises as he denies protection to his critics, threatens journalists with lawsuits, and fires the government workers who once held him to account. And think of all those accomplices lining up behind him, shamelessly claiming that he has been victimized by a deep state hoax. 

The recent bans on DEI remind us that the grievances that count for this administration—and for too many administrations before it—primarily concern Christian nationalists and conservative white men. Moving further into the second Trump presidency, we need to interrogate the power the nation gives to their perceived injuries.

Ahab dies when he is strangled by the harpoon line attached to Moby Dick. The whale sinks his ship, and every crew member dies but one. I trust that Trump will come to a more peaceful, gilded end, but what happens to the rest of us? From Canada and Panama to Gaza, Greenland, and Ukraine (the list grows daily), the world seems stuck on an American ship bent on avenging the president’s wounded psyche. 

A wreck seems inevitable. Surviving that wreck does not.

_{Featured image by Matthew Gonzalez on Unsplash.}