Social Darwinists to tech bros: following the long battle for equality in the US | Books

THistorian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid celebrations of 250 years about declaring freedom and its “self-evident truth, that all men are created equal”. Country of Lords, however, is the history of Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight. Opposite Equality in America.

Concise and complex, this book arrives at an interesting and exciting time finances inequalityPhillips-Fein see Elon Musk “appears as a trillion very much in the minds of the people, and the discomfort, fear and anger at what this shows”.

He said: “It’s always hard to know what’s going to happen after you write a book. “But I think those questions about economic equality and the impact of increased economic governance and stability, and the questions, ‘Can you still have democracy?’

Phillips-Fein studies conservatism and “questions about capitalism and democracy”. His first book, Invisible Handswas a study of businessmen who fought the New Deal of the 1930s. Its successor, Fear City, about the economic crisis in New York in the 1970s, was a Pulitzer prize finalist. His voice is great. It is also unique. Not many books start with founder John Adams and end with Peter Thiel of Palantir, Musk’s fellow techno-fascist. Would such a company seem unfair to Adams, a Boston lawyer who was part of a radical change but feared the revelations?

“I hope this is done,” Phillips-Fein said. “Adams is very different from (metal magnate) Andrew Carnegie and (Yale professor) William Graham Sumner and in the late 1800s Darwinian sociologists, and supporters of slavery. He is also very different from people who say that economic inequality is good.” Adams, however, “was very inconsistent and skeptical about the same thing… during the French Revolution and after: the deep thoughts of you can have a lot of connection.

“In his writings, he also offers a strong conservative brand and a basic perspective on controversial issues to be more egalitarian and more cautious and pessimistic about the politics that claim to be doing this.”

And Adams is taking his place in the Lord’s Land. Other stories include preachers of racial inequality from George Fitzhugh, the Confederate theorist of slavery as a natural good, that. Theodore Lothrop Stoddarda fake journalist who had the biggest sales in 1920 with The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, “part of the intellectual culture of ‘scientific’ racism … after the first world war”. There is also Carnegie, a Scottish-born tycoon who prospered in the prosperous years of the late 19th century.

“What makes Carnegie so interesting is that he allows himself to have unconventional ideas,” Phillips-Fein said. “They are saying that although economic growth is necessary and inevitable, and the elite…should have a greater say in the economy, they are well aware that this is dangerous politically, that…it leads to an unstable society in which the poor and working people can hate the rich, and this is not good for the rich in the long run. Also, they realize that there are social relations.”

Carnegie’s father was a Chartist, seeking the freedom of working people. Carnegie’s biggest contribution to his wealth came through philanthropy, especially in construction libraries for working people.

“He had a very deep sense of fatherhood,” Phillips-Fein said. “He was very busy with the idea of ​​business as love is a kind of place of pleasure and conquest and compassion.” I think Carnegie’s answer was that the rich should have their money but they shouldn’t give too much to their descendants, they should invest it in great charities, and this was better than raising wages. interesting, if it’s also troubling I think it raises a lot of questions that he couldn’t answer.

The Carnegie Steel strike of 1892 and its brutal suppression destroyed House Building, Pennsylvania, and left Carnegie devastated. Now, in Washington, Carnegie Science is the Qatari embassy. At Mount Vernon, the Carnegie library houses an Apple Store.

Country of Lords is also the origin of modern inequality. In the early 1900s, Henry Ford making cars mixed with bad racism. In the 100s, William Shockley he was the proto-tech mogul “who went off the rails”.

“He was the co-founder of the transistor and is mentioned in various histories of Silicon Valley because he ran the company and wanted to have more control, and as a result a group of employees left their jobs and founded their own (two) companies. finally founded Intel) … So after Shockley Labs broke up, Shockley became attracted to racist science, pseudoscience and IQ testing in particular. I don’t think anyone knows what caused this, but he started to speak a lot in public in the mid-60s. He was at Stanford at the time. He should be teaching physics and engineering. “

Shockley, Phillips-Fein says, was truly “a very bad man, and perhaps an unhappy one.” If this sounds familiar, like Musk, Shockley was no exception. By joining the meritocratic movement in the middle of the 1900s, he “didn’t isolate himself. He is really part of a growing group, aggravating people who connect in the late 60s, early 70s, and who are really responding, not always directly, to the events of the civil rights movement.

“It focused on overturning the discriminatory laws that prevent discrimination, but it also talked about the distribution of wealth, saying that the causes of Black poverty are not natural, it shows the centuries of laws and politics that have supported the white economy and laid the foundation for feeding the black workers and working people, and the crushing of politics, and the distribution of other things did not help. everything.”

In such a soil, Phillips-Fein finds the roots of “modern technology”, the rejection of liberal ideas.

“They are very suspicious and hostile to high institutions, or they have strong relationships with them,” he said. “Therefore, Peter Thiel accepts these ideas about the race taken from economist Joseph Schumpeter. He writes about how normal market companies are competing at the edge…

“Thiel has the same idea. He writes about how, ‘I was growing up, I wanted to be the best, I wanted to go to these elite institutions. I went to law school, I had a straight and narrow path, but I realized that everything was wrong, and in fact you had to disrupt everything, to create yourself, to be independent: no one else can be blessed with people of this quality, “. new in the world, those are the people who should win this race and should control the wealth of the people. “

The Lord’s land endures.

• Country of Lords, published by WW Norton & Company, is out now