Mike Munger reviews Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America

From Cafe Hayek.

"This history of the idea of “hierarchy as good,” focusing primarily on the U.S., is useful and interesting. But there are several aspects of the account, and what is left out, that I find puzzling.

First, the focus on hierarchy here is private, or at a minimum non-governmental. But no subjugation is as complete as that of ruled to ruler. Many of the great hierarchy-mongers of American history have designed and operated their power structures supported by the weapons and boot heels of armies and police. Andrew Jackson’s “Trail of Tears”; Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and confiscation of property; Woodrow Wilson’s summary roundup of dissidents, suspension of postal deliveries, and the “Palmer Raids”; Franklin Roosevelt’s seizure of prices and property, followed by forcing thousands of American citizens into concentration camps; Nixon’s draconian wage and price controls; and the intrusive and unconstitutional surveillance state that has grown up after 9/11.

Most recently, and starkly, we saw the comprehensive confinement and draconian dictates of state scientism. The unelected health czar Anthony Fauci offered “I am the science!” as his justification for complete hierarchy; the Biden administration actively crushed dissent, even among those with scientific credentials who were disputing scientific arguments. Surprisingly, the only state actor mentioned here is Woodrow Wilson; he makes the list only because he hosted a viewing of “Birth of a Nation” at the White House.

Second, and perhaps more important, no one claims, to my knowledge, that the distinctive aspect of the U.S. is that there has always been perfect agreement about liberalism and equality under a rule of law. Phillips-Fein does provide a useful service in her careful documentation of some important advocates for hierarchy (even if it is strangely censored to ignore the state), but the actual argument is bizarrely narrow, even myopic. What’s distinctive about the U.S. is not that no voices have clamored for hierarchy, but that those voices have always lost! More than any other nation over the last 250 years, the U.S. has repeatedly recentered itself in equality before the law, and preserved social mobility in the face of substantial efforts to reify hierarchies of many different kinds.

Finally, Phillips-Fein notably strains, and frankly fails, to fit every personality she can scrape up neatly into a single Procrustean anti-egalitarian lineage. John Adams worried that a majoritarian system might struggle to govern, a plausible concern in 1780 given the world’s lack of experience with democracy. Adams is folded in here on the strength of his “ambivalence” about equality; that’s a much softer claim than outright advocacy for hierarchy. Andrew Carnegie is a similar problem: his philanthropic guilt and paternalistic sense of obligation to give back to the public sit awkwardly next to figures like Sumner or Stoddard who denied any such obligation.

When a 250-year argument has its founding-era anchor express nothing stronger than concern for an untried system, that’s a sign the argument is weak. Phillips-Fein concludes that the American belief in equality has always had to compete with a genuinely mainstream counter-tradition rather than triumph outright, which is surely correct. But then she infers that today’s inequality debates aren’t a betrayal of some past consensus so much as a resurgence of one side of a fight that never really ended.

This is a tone-deaf conclusion, and a deep misunderstanding of the liberal tradition. As Thomas Hobbes explained, each individual wants to rule and sees in him or herself the sort of person entitled to deference from others. But as Montesquieu, John Locke, Adam Smith, James Madison, and John Stuart Mill pointed out, we can design a political system that controls and blunts this urge to power. Liberalism is the instantiation of checks and balances, guardrails that limit concentrations of private power. Though there have been voices of dissent in the U.S., people who have sought power, there are fewer of those voices here, and they have been less effective."