TeaHistorian Kim Phillips-Finn’s new book is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and its truth is “self-evident, that all men are created equal”. However, Lord’s is a country of neo-elitists, social Darwinists, tech utopians, and a history of protracted fighting. against Equality in America.
Concise and hard-hitting, the book comes at a time of crippling social and economic inequality, with Phillips-Finn observing Elon Musk’s “emergence as a trillionaire in the public mind, with a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger”.
He said, “It’s always hard to know what’s going to happen when you’ve written a book.” “But I think those questions about economic equality and the impact of economic hierarchy and extreme levels of concentration, and the questions, ‘Can you still have democracy? What are the ways you can combat it? If you want to live in a world that is not characterized by that, what alternative approaches exist?’, exist.”
Phillips-Finn studies conservatism and “questions about capitalism and democracy.” His first book, invisible handwas a study of businessmen who fought the New Deal of the 1930s. His second, Fear City, was about the New York economic crisis of the 1970s. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has a prominent voice. This is also unique. Not many books start with founder John Adams and end with Palantir, Musk’s Peter Thiel fellow techno-fascist. Might such a company seem inappropriate to Adams, a Boston lawyer who was part of a great revolution but feared what it brought?
“I hope that happens,” Phillips-Finn said. Adams is very different from (steel magnate) Andrew Carnegie and (Yale professor) William Graham Sumner and late 19th century Social Darwinists, and abolitionists. He’s certainly very different from the people who are saying that extreme levels of economic inequality are good.” Adams, however, ”was very ambivalent and skeptical of egalitarian claims during and after the French Revolution: You can have too much egalitarianism in a deeper sense of the word.
“In his writing, he conveys a strong kind of conservative temperament and a fundamental understanding of the problems of arguing for greater equality, and also a sense of deep caution and pessimism about the politics that claim to do so.”
And so Adams took his place in the House of Lords. Other subjects range from George Fitzhugh, a preacher of race-based inequality, to the Federalist theorist who believed slavery was a natural good, to Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, a hack journalist whose 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, a major bestseller, was “part of a larger intellectual subculture of ‘scientific’ racism after World War I”. There’s also Carnegie, the Scottish-born tycoon who flourished in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
Phillips-Finn said, “What makes Carnegie so interesting is that he at least allows himself to have some sense of ambivalence.” “He says that while the concentration of wealth is absolutely necessary and inevitable, and that the people at the top…should have the ultimate authority over resources, he knows deep down that it is politically dangerous, that…it creates an unstable society in which the poor and the working class can actually hate the rich, and that is not in the interests of the rich in the long run. At the same time, he also realizes that human brotherhood is lost, or any kind of community that existed.”
Carnegie’s father was a Chartist who sought rights for the working class. Carnegie’s main source of doubt about his wealth was philanthropy, which primarily involved construction. Library For working people.
“He had a very strong sense of fatherhood,” Phillips-Finn said. “He was very invested in the idea of business as a place of romance and a kind of adventure and conquest and feudal philanthropy. I think Carnegie’s answer ultimately was that the rich should have their money, but they shouldn’t bequeath much to their descendants, they should invest it in massive philanthropic projects, and that was better than raising salaries or other things like that… I think it’s the level of their guilt and dilemma that makes them attractive, but disturbing. Also does. I think it raises a bunch of questions that he was definitely never able to solve.
The Carnegie steel strike of 1892 and its violent suppression devastated Homestead, Pennsylvania, and Carnegie became disillusioned. Now, in Washington, Carnegie Science is the Qatari embassy. In Mount Vernon, the Carnegie Library hosts an Apple Store.
Country of the Lords is also a primer on modern inequality. In the early 1900s, Henry Ford mixed mass auto production with horrific racism. At mid-century, William Shockley was a proto-tech mogul “who went completely off the rails”.
“He was the co-inventor of the transistor and his name appears in various histories of Silicon Valley because he ran this company and wanted to retain a tremendous amount of control, and as a result a group of employees quit and founded their own firm (two) ultimately Founding of Intel) … So after the collapse of Shockley Labs, Shockley became particularly attracted to racist science, pseudoscience, and IQ testing. I don’t think anyone really knows what caused it, but they started talking a lot about it publicly in the mid-’60s. He was at Stanford at that time. He had to teach physics and engineering.
Phillips-Fain says Shockley was actually “a uniquely terrible person, and probably quite sad.” If this sounds familiar, like Musk, Shockley was not unique. Connected to the mid-century meritocracy movement, he wasn’t isolated. He’s actually part of a growing, troubling community of people who came together in the late ’60s, early ’70s, and who were responding, though not always directly, to the civil rights movement.
“It focused explicitly on overturning racist legislation that underpinned segregation, but it also made claims about the distribution of resources, saying that the causes of black poverty are not innate, they reflect centuries of legal and political structures that have perpetuated white wealth and laid the foundation for the exploitation of black workers and working-class people, and that political disenfranchisement has led to this distribution of resources. In other words, it has nothing to do with merit.”
In such soil, Phillips-Finn traces the roots of “today’s tech giants” who reject liberal ideals.
“They are very skeptical and hostile toward specific institutions, or at least, have very broad relationships with them,” he said. “So Peter Thiel adopts this set of ideas about competition taken from the economist Joseph Schumpeter. He writes about how in a normal market there are companies competing on the margins… but occasionally someone will come along and make a new invention, which usually dominates the market and changes it, and whoever does it first will completely change the market.
“Thiel has the same idea. He writes about how, ‘Growing up, I wanted to be the best, I wanted to go to these elite institutions. I went to law school, I had the straight and narrow path, but then I realized that was all wrong, and really you had to disrupt everything, create your own monopoly, a monopoly of one: no one else can ever be you,’ and then those people who are blessed with this talent to recognize that something is completely different in the world. How to create something new, they are the ones who are able to win this race and capture the resources of society.”
The country of lords remains intact.
-
Country of Lords is published by WW Norton & Company out now
