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SOCIAL DARWINISTS TO TECH BROS: TRACING THE LONG FIGHT AGAINST
EQUALITY IN US  
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Martin Pengelly
July 21, 2026
The Guardian [[link removed]]

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_ Historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s book Country of Lords looks back at
the many men who have tried to fight against egalitarianism, from John
Adams to Peter Thiel _

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk in 2000, Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

 

The historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid
celebrations of the 250th anniversary
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declaration of independence and its truth “self-evident, that all
men are created equal”. Country of Lords, however, is a history of
Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight
_Against_ Equality in America.

Concise and hard-hitting, the book arrives at a time of glaring social
and economic
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inequality
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Phillips-Fein seeing Elon Musk
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trillionaire
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very much on people’s minds, with a deep level of discomfort, both
fear and anger about what this portends”.

“It’s always hard to know what’s going to be happening when you
have written a book,” she 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
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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 [[link removed]]. Hers is
a major voice. It’s also unique. Not many books start with founder
John Adams and end with Peter Thiel of Palantir, Musk’s fellow
techno-fascist
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such company seem unfair on Adams, the Boston lawyer who was part of a
great revolution but feared what was unleashed?

“I hope this comes through,” Phillips-Fein said. “Adams is very
different from [steel magnate] Andrew Carnegie and [Yale professor]
William Graham Sumner [[link removed]] 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.

Photograph: WW Norton & Company

“In his writing, he does also give a strong kind of conservative
temperament and foundational sense of the problems of arguing for
greater equality and a deep wariness and sense of pessimism about a
politics that claims to do that.”

And so Adams takes his place in Country of Lords. Other subjects
include preachers of race-based inequality from George Fitzhugh, a
Confederate theorist of slavery as natural good, to Theodore Lothrop
Stoddard
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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
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“He had a very deep sense of paternalism,” Phillips-Fein said.
“He was very invested in the idea of business as a romance and kind
of a space of adventure and conquest and feudal benevolence. I think
Carnegie’s answer was ultimately that the wealthy should have their
money but they shouldn’t bequeath much to their descendants, they
should invest it in massive philanthropic projects, and this was
better than raising wages or other things like that … It is his
level of guilt and ambivalence that I think does make him appealing,
if also troubling. I think it raises a set of questions that he
certainly was never really able to resolve.”

The 1892 Carnegie Steel strike and its violent suppression devastated
Homestead, Pennsylvania, and left Carnegie disillusioned. Now, in
Washington, Carnegie Science is the Qatari embassy. At Mount Vernon,
the Carnegie library hosts an Apple Store.

Country of Lords is also a primer on modern inequality. In the early
1900s, Henry Ford
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mass auto production with vicious racism. In mid-century, William
Shockley [[link removed]]
was a proto-tech mogul “who went completely off the rails”.

Andrew Carnegie. Photograph: AP

“He was a co-inventor of the transistor and he figures in different
histories of Silicon Valley because he ran this company and wanted to
maintain a tremendous amount of control, and as a result a bunch of
the employees quit and founded their own firm [two eventually
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after Shockley Labs fell apart, Shockley started to become drawn to
racist science, pseudoscience and IQ testing in particular. I don’t
think anybody really knows exactly what triggered this, but he starts
to talk a lot about it publicly in the mid-60s. He was at Stanford at
the time. He was supposed to be teaching physics and engineering.”

Shockley, Phillips-Fein says, was really “a uniquely horrible
person, and probably quite unhappy as well.” If that sounds
familiar, also like Musk, Shockley wasn’t unique. Linked to the
meritocratic movement of the mid-century, he was “not isolated. He
is actually part of what is a growing, troubling community of people
who coalesce in the late 60s, early 70s, and who are really
responding, not always directly, to the context of the civil rights
movement.

“It was obviously focused on overturning racist legislation that
undergirded segregation, but it also made claims about the
distribution of resources, saying the reasons for Black poverty are
not innate, they reflect centuries of legal and political structures
that have upheld white wealth and laid the foundation for exploitation
of Black workers and working-class people, and the political
disfranchisement has resulted in this distribution of resources. In
other words, that’s nothing to do with merit at all.”

In such soil, Phillips-Fein finds the roots of “the tech titans of
today”, rejecting liberal ideals.

“They are very skeptical and hostile towards elite institutions, or
at least, have a very broad relationship to them,” she said. “So
Peter Thiel embraces this set of ideas about competition drawn from
the economist Joseph Schumpeter
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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 has the same idea. He kind of writes about how, ‘I was
growing up, I wanted to be the best, I wanted to go to these elite
institutions. I went to law school, I had the straight and narrow
path, but then I realized that all that was wrong, and actually you
had to disrupt everything, create your own monopoly, a monopoly of
one: nobody else can ever be you,’ and then the people who are kind
of blessed with this genius to recognize how to create something
completely new in the world, those are the people who will deserve to
win in this race and deserve to command the resources of society.”

The Country of Lords endures.

*
Country of Lords, published by WW Norton & Company, is out now
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_MARTIN PENGELLY is a freelance journalist_

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