Some Americans don’t believe all people are created equal. Their movement is going mainstream, this author says

America’s 250th Anniversary Meets a Century-Old Argument: Wealth Is Natural, Hierarchy Is Good

Healfromzero.com – As the United States marks two and a half centuries since its founding, a quiet but persistent current of thought has resurfaced with unusual force. Its central claim runs counter to the most famous sentence in the Declaration of Independence: that human beings arrive in the world with equal standing. Instead, a growing chorus of voices — from Silicon Valley billionaires to steel magnates of a bygone era — insists that vast gaps in wealth, intelligence, and social rank are not merely inevitable but desirable features of a functioning society.

Historian Kim Phillips-Fein, a Pulitzer Prize finalist recognized for her earlier work examining New York City’s fiscal collapse in the 1970s and the subsequent rise of austerity politics, has spent years tracing this intellectual lineage. Her new book, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America, argues that anti-egalitarian thinking is not a fringe position that recently crept into public discourse. It is, in her framing, a “shadow tradition” running parallel to American democracy since the Founding era, now finding mainstream expression through technology leaders and venture capitalists.

The Shadow Tradition, Named

Phillips-Fein identifies a recurring argument that threads through centuries of American political thought. The logic runs roughly as follows: some people are innately more capable, more intelligent, or more industrious than others; therefore, the concentration of wealth and power in their hands is not a failure of the system but its proper output. She places figures as diverse as John Adams, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Ford in the same intellectual lineage as contemporary tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

“Openly anti-egalitarian ideas are flourishing — the claim that monarchy might be preferable to democracy; that autocratic societies in which power is tightly controlled from above are preferable to open ones; that rich people are smarter, more capable, and more talented than those without money; and that society should simply accept the concentration of intergenerational wealth.”

That passage, drawn from the book itself, lays bare the range of positions Phillips-Fein groups together. What unites them is not a single policy preference but a metaphysical claim about human nature: that hierarchy is written into biology and history, and that democratic egalitarianism is, at best, a sentimental fiction.

Why Now? Economic Conditions and the Trillionaire Moment

The timing of the book’s publication is not accidental. Phillips-Fein notes that she did not anticipate writing about a world in which the planet’s first trillionaire — a title briefly held by Elon Musk — would emerge during the same summer the book hit shelves. The sheer scale of that concentration of capital, she argues, gives empirical weight to arguments that would otherwise sound abstract.

The broader economic backdrop reinforces the point. American income and wealth inequality now exceeds that of nearly every other developed nation. A comparatively small cohort of ultra-wealthy individuals wields outsized influence over both economic policy and political outcomes. Phillips-Fein contends that these material conditions make the anti-egalitarian narrative feel less like ideology and more like description, which is precisely what gives it persuasive traction among ordinary voters, including working-class Americans who have come to accept that extreme inequality benefits the national economy.

What the Founders Actually Wanted

One of the book’s more pointed interventions is historical. Phillips-Fein argues that many Americans of the Revolutionary era were driven less by a love of liberty in the abstract than by a visceral hatred of hierarchy and inherited rank. They envisioned, in her words, a “country without lords, kings or a hereditary aristocracy.” The egalitarian impulse was not a later liberal addition to American politics; it was, for many founders, the original project.

That framing matters because it reframes the current debate. If the anti-egalitarian position is presented as a natural, timeless truth about human nature, it appears beyond democratic contestation. But if it is understood as one tradition in an ongoing argument — one that the founders themselves contested — then it becomes subject to the same political scrutiny as any other policy claim.

The Counter-Current: Democratic Socialism and the Return of Egalitarian Rhetoric

Phillips-Fein also points to a countervailing trend. The growing electoral popularity of democratic socialist candidates across the United States suggests, in her reading, a partial reassertion of the egalitarian strand. Voters who once accepted the premise that inequality is natural and beneficial are, in measurable numbers, questioning that premise at the ballot box. Whether this represents a durable shift or a cyclical correction remains an open question, but Phillips-Fein treats it as evidence that the “shadow tradition” has not achieved final dominance.

What the Book Asks

At its core, Country of Lords poses a question Phillips-Fein says she could not stop asking: how did an economy and society become so extraordinarily unequal, and why do so many people accept that level of disparity as both natural and beneficial? She rejects the temptation to locate the answer in a single election cycle or a single political figure. Instead, she maps the argument across centuries, from the Federalist debates through the Gilded Age to the present-day technology sector, showing how each generation’s version of the anti-egalitarian claim adapts to its moment while preserving the same underlying structure.

The stakes, as she frames them, are not merely academic. If the premise that inequality is natural and good becomes the default assumption of public life, democratic institutions lose their normative foundation. The book is, in effect, an argument that the premise itself is contestable — and that contesting it is not naïveté but the work American democracy was built to do.