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

A “Shadow Tradition” of Anti-Egalitarianism Is Reshaping American Political Life, Historian Argues

Activelifezero.com – As the United States marks its 250th anniversary of independence, a new book by historian Kim Phillips-Fein argues that a persistent undercurrent of thought has long worked to undermine the egalitarian ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Titled Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America, the work traces a lineage of anti-egalitarian thinking from the nation’s earliest political figures through today’s tech billionaires and venture capitalists.

Phillips-Fein, a Pulitzer Prize finalist recognized for her earlier book examining New York City’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s and the subsequent rise of austerity politics, contends that what she calls a “shadow tradition” of thinkers has spent centuries preaching a single thesis: that extreme inequality is not merely inevitable in American life but actively beneficial to the country.

“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.”

From Founding Fathers to Tech Billionaires

The book does not limit its scope to contemporary figures. Phillips-Fein places John Adams, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and automobile pioneer Henry Ford in the same intellectual lineage as Elon Musk and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Each, she argues, advanced some version of the claim that natural hierarchies of talent, intelligence, or ambition justify vast disparities in wealth and political influence.

The author describes these thinkers as preaching their variations “fiercely, angrily, and passionately,” forming a continuous thread that runs alongside — and often directly against — the democratic tradition Americans celebrate in schoolbooks. The implication is that the egalitarian impulse has never held a monopoly on American political imagination.

Economic Conditions as Catalyst

Phillips-Fein points to present-day economic realities as the fuel that has carried these once-marginal ideas into mainstream discourse. 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. The brief moment in summer 2025 when Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, she notes, crystallized the book’s central question: how did such an extraordinary concentration of wealth come to pass?

The author frames the issue not as a single policy failure but as a structural drift. When inequality reaches a level that, in her words, makes “it increasingly hard for democracy to function,” the question shifts from whether inequality exists to whether citizens will continue to accept it as natural and desirable.

The Revolutionary Rejection of Hierarchy

To understand what is being challenged, Phillips-Fein returns to the motivations of the Revolutionary generation. Many of the era’s leading figures were driven by what she describes as a visceral hatred of hierarchy and inherited rank. They envisioned, in her phrasing, a “country without lords, kings or a hereditary aristocracy.” That founding impulse — the conviction that no person is born with a natural right to command another — is the standard against which the “shadow tradition” measures itself, and the standard the book argues is now under sustained attack.

Why Working-Class Americans Embrace Inequality

A particularly pointed question runs through the book: why do some working-class and poor Americans actively endorse the belief that extreme inequality benefits the nation? Phillips-Fein suggests the answer lies in the long historical availability of arguments that frame wealth as proof of superior intellect or effort, and poverty as evidence of poor choices. When these narratives are amplified by media figures of enormous reach, they can reshape how ordinary people interpret their own economic circumstances.

The author was motivated, she explains, by wanting to move beyond treating conservatism as a product of a single election cycle or a single presidential administration. Rather than isolating the 2016 election or the Reagan era, she maps the intellectual architecture that makes such appeals possible across generations.

A Possible Counter-Current

Phillips-Fein also points to the growing electoral popularity of democratic socialist candidates in recent American politics as a potential signal that egalitarian ideas are reasserting themselves. Whether this represents a durable shift or a cyclical reaction remains an open question, but she treats it as evidence that the contest between the two traditions — the egalitarian and the anti-egalitarian — is far from settled.

The book lands at a moment when the practical consequences of the debate are no longer abstract. Trillion-dollar fortunes, algorithmic gatekeeping of information, and the consolidation of political influence in a handful of hands make the question of whether Americans still believe in created equality a matter of immediate governance rather than philosophical abstraction.