Historian Kim Phillips-Fein's new book, Country of Lords: The Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America, is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and its truth "self-evident, that all men are created equal."
Concise and hard-hitting, the book arrives at a time of glaring social and economic inequality, with Phillips-Fein seeing Elon Musk "emerging as a trillionaire very much on people's minds, with a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger about what this portends."
Questions of democracy and hierarchy
"It's always hard to know what's going to be happening when you have written a book," Phillips-Fein said. "But I think those questions about economic equality and the impact of extreme levels of economic hierarchy and concentration, and the questions, 'Can you still have a democracy any longer? What are the ways that you can counter that? What alternate visions are there if you want to live in a world that's not characterized that way?', are present."
Phillips-Fein studies conservatism and "questions about capitalism and democracy." Her first book, Invisible Hands, examined businessmen who fought the New Deal of the 1930s. Her second, Fear City, about the New York economic crisis of the 1970s, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize.
From John Adams to Peter Thiel
Not many books start with founder John Adams and end with Peter Thiel of Palantir, Musk's fellow techno-fascist. Phillips-Fein said, "Adams is very different from [steel magnate] Andrew Carnegie and [Yale professor] William Graham Sumner and the late 19th-century social Darwinists, and the pro-slavery advocates. He's also definitely very different from people who are saying extreme levels of economic inequality are good."
Adams, however, was "very ambivalent and skeptical of egalitarian claims … during and after the French Revolution: a deep sense of you can have too much egalitarianism."
Subjects include race-based inequality advocates
Other subjects include preachers of race-based inequality from George Fitzhugh, a Confederate theorist of slavery as natural good, to Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, a hack journalist who had a huge bestseller in 1920 with The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, "part of a larger intellectual subculture of 'scientific' racism … in the aftermath of world war one."
There is also Carnegie, the Scottish-born tycoon who flourished in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. "What makes Carnegie so interesting is that he at least allows himself to have some sense of ambivalence," Phillips-Fein said. "He says that while the concentration of wealth is absolutely necessary and inevitable, and the people at the top … should have the ultimate say over resources, he is deeply aware that this is politically dangerous, that … it creates an unstable society in which the poor and the working class might actually hate the wealthy, and that's not in the interest of the wealthy in the long run. Also, he has a sense that human brotherhood is lost, or some kind of community that had existed."
Carnegie's father was a Chartist, seeking working-class rights. Carnegie's major outlet for doubts about his wealth came through philanthropy, prominently the construction of libraries for working people.
Modern inequality and tech titans
In the early 1900s, Henry Ford mixed mass auto production with vicious racism. In mid-century, William Shockley was a proto-tech mogul "who went completely off the rails." Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor, ran a company and wanted to maintain tremendous control, leading employees to quit and found their own firm (two eventually founding Intel). After Shockley Labs fell apart, Shockley started to become drawn to racist science, pseudoscience and IQ testing.
Phillips-Fein says Shockley was "a uniquely horrible person, and probably quite unhappy as well." He was part of a growing community in the late 60s, early 70s responding to the context of the civil rights movement, which made claims about distribution of resources.
Phillips-Fein finds the roots of "the tech titans of today" in such soil. "So Peter Thiel embraces this set of ideas about competition drawn from the economist Joseph Schumpeter. He writes about how companies in a normal marketplace are competing at the margins … but every so often someone will come along and create a new invention, usually that winds up dominating the marketplace and changing it, and whoever does that first will completely change the marketplace."
Thiel writes about how he wanted to be the best and go to elite institutions, but then realized that was wrong and "you had to disrupt everything, create your own monopoly, a monopoly of one: nobody else can ever be you."
Country of Lords, published by WW Norton & Company, is out now.
