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 Politics, Historian Argues

Sandego.net – As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, a new book by historian Kim Phillips-Fein contends that a persistent undercurrent of anti-egalitarian thought has run through American history since the founding era — and that this current is now surging into the mainstream of public discourse. Titled Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America, the work traces a lineage of thinkers who have rejected the Declaration of Independence’s core assertion that all people are created equal, arguing instead that hierarchy, inherited privilege, and concentrated wealth are natural and even desirable features of society.

Phillips-Fein, a Pulitzer Prize finalist recognized for her earlier book examining New York City’s fiscal collapse in the 1970s and the subsequent rise of austerity politics, positions her latest project as an answer to a question that has haunted American political life for decades: why do ideas celebrating inequality continue to find fertile ground in a nation built on egalitarian rhetoric?

The Argument in Brief

The book identifies what Phillips-Fein calls a “shadow tradition” — a parallel intellectual stream that has operated alongside, and in direct opposition to, the overt democratic-egalitarian narrative taught in schools. Where the mainstream story celebrates liberty and equality, this shadow current insists that people differ in innate capacity, that extreme wealth gaps are both inevitable and beneficial, and that tightly controlled, top-down governance outperforms open democratic systems.

“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.”

Phillips-Fein names figures spanning centuries who have advanced versions of this argument. Among the modern examples she highlights are Elon Musk and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Among the historical predecessors she points to John Adams, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and automobile pioneer Henry Ford — all of whom, at various points, voiced skepticism about the practical wisdom of radical equality.

Economic Conditions as Catalyst

The book does not treat this intellectual tradition as a purely abstract phenomenon. Phillips-Fein argues that recent economic realities have given the shadow tradition unprecedented traction. American income and wealth inequality now stands well above the levels found in virtually every other developed economy. A narrow cohort of ultra-wealthy individuals wields outsized influence over both economic policy and political outcomes. The brief emergence of the world’s first trillionaire — a distinction Elon Musk briefly held in the summer the book was published — exemplifies the scale of concentration Phillips-Fein finds alarming.

These conditions, she contends, make the anti-egalitarian message feel less like ideology and more like description. When a small number of people accumulate wealth that dwarfs the fortunes of previous generations, the argument that inequality is “natural” and “inevitable” gains a veneer of empirical plausibility that it would lack in a more evenly distributed economy.

Founding Ideals Under Erosion

Phillips-Fein stresses that the Revolutionary generation was animated by a visceral hostility to hierarchy. The founders envisioned, in her words, a “country without lords, kings or a hereditary aristocracy.” That vision was not merely rhetorical; it shaped constitutional structures, land policies, and cultural norms for generations. Yet the book documents how, even in the early republic, figures like Adams questioned whether true equality was achievable or desirable, planting seeds that later thinkers would cultivate.

The erosion Phillips-Fein describes is not limited to elite circles. She notes that segments of the working class and poor populations have begun embracing the notion that extreme inequality benefits the national economy — a rhetorical inversion that places the burden of economic failure on individual choices rather than structural conditions.

A Possible Counter-Current

Amid the book’s diagnosis, Phillips-Fein also gestures toward a countervailing trend: the growing electoral popularity of democratic socialist candidates across American politics. She suggests this surge may signal a partial reassertion of the egalitarian impulse that the shadow tradition has spent decades suppressing. Whether that impulse can translate into durable policy change remains an open question, but its visibility marks a shift in the public conversation about what American society owes its members.

Why the Book Matters Now

Phillips-Fein began her research without anticipating that the book would land in the same summer as the first trillionaire milestone. That coincidence, she acknowledges, sharpened the work’s urgency. The question at its center is not merely academic: how did an economy become so lopsided that democracy’s functioning is strained? And why do so many citizens accept conditions that would have been unthinkable to the generation that wrote the Declaration?

By mapping the intellectual genealogy from Adams through Carnegie and Ford to Musk and Thiel, Country of Lords reframes contemporary political debates as chapters in a centuries-long contest over whether American society will honor its founding egalitarian commitments or drift toward a self-justifying aristocracy of wealth and power. The book’s central warning is that this drift is not a fringe phenomenon but a mainstream one — and that recognizing its historical depth is a prerequisite for resisting it.