https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/books/review/country-of-lords-kim-phillips-fein.html
Nonfiction
The Men Who Believed Some Men Are More Equal Than Others
In a new book, the historian Kim Phillips-Fein chronicles a “shadow tradition” of anti-egalitarians who fought against America’s founding ideals.
In a new book, the historian Kim Phillips-Fein chronicles a “shadow tradition” of anti-egalitarians who fought against America’s founding ideals.
When the white supremacist historian Lothrop Stoddard (left) challenged the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (right) at a public debate over race and intelligence in 1929, the audience found Stoddard unpersuasive. Credit: The New York Times; MPI/Getty Images
by Jennifer Szalai
July 22, 2026
New York Times
COUNTRY OF LORDS: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America | by Kim Phillips-Fein | Norton | 246 pp. | $35
by Jennifer Szalai
July 22, 2026
New York Times
COUNTRY OF LORDS: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America | by Kim Phillips-Fein | Norton | 246 pp. | $35
Country of Lords
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The posters billed it as “one of the greatest debates ever held.” On March 17, 1929, the Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois faced off against the white supremacist historian Lothrop Stoddard. The question under consideration: “Has the Negro the Same Intellectual Possibility as Other Races?”
According to newspaper accounts, Stoddard failed to win over the interracial audience with his contempt for “cultural equality” and his veneration of the “color line.” Two years before, he had written a gushing essay about Italian Fascism, which he praised for its “realistic, pragmatic temper.” “Men being thus unequal,” he wrote approvingly, “democracy, in the ordinary sense of the word, is an unrealizable absurdity.”
“Men being thus unequal”: Stoddard’s offhand presumption cut squarely against the self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence, with its plain statement that “all men are created equal.” But Stoddard was just one in a long line of reactionary American thinkers who have railed against this foundational idea. As the historian Kim Phillips-Fein shows in her excellent new book, “Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America,” there has always been a robust “shadow tradition” of figures like Stoddard — anti-egalitarians who deem inequality not just inevitable but a cause for celebration.
Phillips-Fein has written books about the fiscal crisis in 1970s New York and conservative organizing against the New Deal. She comes to her subject from a place of genuine curiosity and with a measure of bewilderment. Her parents were active in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s; she remembers Fourth of July celebrations that included homemade butcher-paper banners with the opening words of the Declaration of Independence. She notes that as inequality has surged in the United States, with a minuscule coterie of rich people holding vast amounts of wealth and political power, anti-egalitarian doctrines are surging, too. Right-wing figures are extolling autocracy and even monarchy. “Why is this?” Phillips-Fein asks. “What has encouraged these ideas to proliferate?”
“Country of Lords” begins with Lord Adam Gordon, a minor British noble who visited the American colonies in the 18th century, and ends with the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. In between we get complex yet unsparing portraits of anti-egalitarians both famous and lesser known, including the 19th-century social theorists George Fitzhugh and William Graham Sumner, as well as the business titans Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. We read about how President John Adams worried that if political power were “wholly entrusted” to the people, “the poor and the vicious would instantly rob the rich and virtuous.” The 20th-century economist Milton Friedman, for his part, cheerfully advanced an idea of a free market that justified rising inequality with a populist gloss.
Phillips-Fein has chosen her cast of characters well. Each anti-egalitarian is anti-egalitarian in his own way. A fascinating chapter moves between Sumner’s laudatory musings about how “competition is hurrying on the survival of the fittest” and Carnegie’s more tormented conscience. Carnegie, she says, “had to deal personally with the moral and ethical implications of great wealth in a way that Sumner did not.” True, in the 1880s and 1890s, Carnegie crushed the unions in his steel mills in order to maintain his profits. But he was plagued by guilt and subsequently increased his philanthropic giving.
The chapter on Carnegie and Sumner also conveys something else. It’s the scholars and writers in this book who often turn out to be some of inequality’s most vehement ideologues. Sumner, for instance, was a popular professor at Yale; like Stoddard after him, he was always hungry for attention. In an essay written after his death, a former student recalled the “malicious pleasure” he took in shocking the tender sensibilities of high-minded reformers. Once, when a colleague from the divinity school asked him about the poor, Sumner scoffed, “Let ’em die! Let ’em die!”
Phillips-Fein says that we shouldn’t underestimate the “charismatic appeal” of reactionary beliefs, especially in the American context; our traditional “nostrums about equality” are partly why attacks on equality have carried a “transgressive, exciting charge.” But as she guides us through the ensuing decades, she notices a change taking place in the 1960s and 1970s. Before that time, anti-egalitarians typically seemed haunted by the old ideals of equality and fairness, even as they railed against them; the “neoreactionaries” since then have been far less troubled, blithely rejecting “the very idea that people were created equal.”
Silicon Valley has been an especially nurturing environment for those who denounce democracy and promote extreme concentrations of wealth. Phillips-Fein suggests that some right-wing tech moguls have become so caught up in fantastical notions that they are unmoored from reality. In the digital world, “abstractions mattered far more than the real world of objects and people,” she writes. “It was, for that reason, a world in which the physical realm — of hunger, need, labor — came to be subordinate to the world of thought, of pure intellect and mind.” Hence the obsession with staying forever young and even defying death. (Thiel has called cryonics “ideologically important.”) For our tech overlords, the future lies not with humanity but with technology.
Where this leaves the rest of us is nowhere good, but Phillips-Fein argues that hope is more essential than ever. After all, the anti-egalitarian style of American politics ultimately feeds off despair. She quotes Abraham Lincoln in 1858 deriding the self-serving rationales that monarchs used to justify their absolute power over their piddling subjects. Their reasoning always boiled down to “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruit.”
“Country of Lords” shows how even some of the most galaxy-brained technokings — who would rather find ways to colonize outer space than pay more taxes — are nevertheless poor laggards when it comes to one thing. Despite all their riches and technological know-how, they are still afflicted by a condition that is very banal and very old: a poverty of moral imagination.
COUNTRY OF LORDS: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America | By Kim Phillips-Fein | Norton | 246 pp. | $35
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
See more on: Andrew Carnegie, W E B Du Bois, Henry Ford
