Social Darwinists to tech bros: tracing the long fight against equality in US
Historian Kim Phillips-Fein's new book, Country of Lords, traces a long lineage of American thinkers and figures who have resisted the ideal of equality, from founding father John Adams to modern tech figures such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the book arrives at a moment of stark economic inequality, with Phillips-Fein pointing to Musk's rise as a trillionaire as emblematic of public unease about concentrated wealth and power and their implications for democracy.
The book spans figures including Adams, whose writings reveal scepticism about egalitarian claims following the French Revolution; Confederate slavery apologist George Fitzhugh; 1920s "scientific racism" author Theodore Lothrop Stoddard; Gilded Age steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who saw wealth concentration as both inevitable and politically dangerous; and contemporary tech figures such as Thiel. Phillips-Fein, known for earlier works Invisible Hands and the Pulitzer-finalist Fear City, frames the book as an exploration of recurring arguments against economic and social equality throughout US history, and what alternatives might exist to counter extreme hierarchy today.
- New book traces US history of arguments against equality and democracy.
- Spans John Adams to modern tech figures like Musk and Thiel.
- Author links rising inequality today to older elitist ideologies.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
A thoughtful sceptic of strict egalitarianism might argue that societies inevitably reward differences in talent, effort and risk-taking, and that flattening those distinctions can dull incentives to innovate or excel. They would contend that hierarchies of achievement, when earned through open competition rather than inherited privilege, are not inherently unjust but reflect meaningful variation among people, and that policies aimed at enforcing equal outcomes can undermine liberty, merit and economic dynamism.
The case against
A committed egalitarian would counter that the declaration's founding promise of equality has too often been honoured in rhetoric while being undermined in practice by concentrated wealth and power. They would argue that vast disparities are rarely purely the product of merit, but are shaped by inherited advantage, luck and structural barriers, and that a healthy democracy requires active efforts to check entrenched hierarchies so that opportunity is genuinely shared rather than monopolised by a fortunate few.