The Titan by Theodore Dreiser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Why Swell'st Thou So?

Trump is a perennial American type, the coarse outsider who is driven to succeed at all costs. And he does frequently win. The paradox, however, is that his measure of success, his criteria for what constitutes winning, are supplied by others. Thus Trump and his ilk are the least free of human beings, constantly striving to become what others value.

Frank Algernon Cowperwood, Dreiser’s protagonist, is proto-Trumpian in all the type’s frightening details. Dreiser was a contemporary of Edmund Husserl, the philosopher of Phenomenology, the study of how things appear to human consciousness. Although there is no evidence that Dreiser knew of Husserl’s work, The Titan is best described as a phenomenology of the peculiarly America search for power, written without judgement but in overpoweringly accurate detail.

Probably since its founding, certainly since its Civil War, America has been dominated by a culture of unconstrained acquisition of wealth and influence. Dreiser knows the psychology, the sociology and the politics of this perennial urge, which seems endemic to democracy. The desire for power, at least for some significant portion of American residents, is driven primarily by its possession by others rather than its necessity for achieving anything with it.

No amount of wealth, security, or reputation is sufficient to allay the need for more power because this American power has no objective but itself. As Dreiser puts it, “It is thus that life at its topmost toss irks and pains. Beyond is ever the unattainable, the lure of the infinite with its infinite ache.” One can never achieve the power one desires as long as others have any as well.

“[Cowperwood’s] business as he saw it was with the material facts of life, or, rather, with those third and fourth degree theorems and syllogisms which control material things and so represent wealth.” It is the first and second degree theorems, however, that establish why wealth is important at all; and Cowperwood has no knowledge of these.

Like Trump, Cowperwood is “temperamentally... in sympathy with the mass more than he was with the class, and he understood the mass better.” But this sympathy has nothing of real concern in it, “He could, should, and would rule alone... Men must swing around him as planets around the sun.” Both are consummate egotists, “The truth was he believed in himself, and himself only, and thence sprang his courage to think as he pleased.” Or that is his conceit as he obviously attempts to fit in and rise within the commercial and social establishment of Chicago.

There are consequences, however, for this type of phenomenological consciousness, perhaps the most important of which is a complete lack of self-awareness. Cowperwood confronts “...the unsolvable mystery that he was even to himself—to himself most of all.” I suspect Trump is also a similar enigma to Trump.

Like Trump, Cowperwood likes to buy talent, “He wanted the intellectual servants. He was willing to pay.” With this talent, particularly legal talent, he can intimidate and dominate. ‘“Let them blow,” said Cowperwood. “We can blow, too, and sue also. I like lawsuits. We’ll tie them up so that they’ll beg for quarter.” His eyes twinkled cheerfully.’ He knows how the world really works, “Don’t worry. I haven’t seen many troubles in this world that money wouldn’t cure.”

He also knows the reality of American politics, which in its Republican variety operates primarily on greed. This means a limited but effective set of standard political tactics: “...robbery, ballot-box stuffing, the sale of votes, the appointive power of leaders, graft, nepotism, vice exploitation—all the things that go to make up the American world of politics and financial and social strife.”

So Trump’s braggadocio is not an aberration, it is the epitome of the perennial American character, a character that swells without limit... until it bursts. It is without purpose but not without effect. And that effect is always detrimental. Trump’s journey from the New York suburbs to the national capital is very much like Cowperwood’s from Philadelphia to Chicago, “How different, for some reason, from Philadelphia! That was a stirring city, too. He had thought it wonderful at one time, quite a world; but this thing, while obviously infinitely worse, was better.” And he could make it worse still.

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