The Long Struggle Against Equality in America (w/ Kim Phillips-Fein)
Matt and Sam talk to historian Kim Phillips-Fein about her new book, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America.
Duration
1h 44m
Broadcast on
24 Aug 2026
Audio Format
other
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In this episode, we're pleased to welcome back historian Kim Phillips-Fein, one of the truly outstanding observers of the right, past and present, working today, for a conversation about her new book, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America. It makes for a companion episode of sorts to our recent discussions on Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence, but this time about those who rejected equality: proponents of slavery, biological racists (in various forms), captains of industry, and more, from the American founding through today's tech billionaires like Peter Thiel.
All right, welcome listeners to episode 142 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippen, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend, Sam at the Bell. Hello, Sam. Hello, Matt. I should say for this episode, not just my dear friend and podcast co-host, but my equal. News to me. Yes, this is the egalitarian podcast, at least for this episode. I really walked into that one, Dennis. I'll set you up for it. But we are here to introduce a fantastic conversation we had with our friend, Kim Phillips, Find the Historian, about her new book, Country of Lords, Neil Aristocrats, Social Darwinist, Tech Utopians, in the long fight against equality in America, which was great. Great book, amazing conversation. You're going to love it. Kim, of course, is the gardener Kenneth T. Jackson, Professor of History at Columbia University. She's also the author of two previous books, which we've talked about in the show, Before Fear City, about New York's fiscal crisis and the rise of austerity politics from 2017. And in 2009, her book Invisible Hands about the businessman's revolt against the New Deal. Kim's work could not be more relevant to this show. She has been on the show before. We talked to her, I think, two years ago about historiography of the right, naturally, and about different ways of interpreting conservative history. That was a great conversation. And this was an amazing conversation, too. Yeah, I think extraordinarily highly of Kim as a historian and a person. Her work is just, I know I say this at the start, but let me just repeat it, Kim's work is just really superb. And I feel like this book, the writing in it, the synthesis, it really is a model of kind of like elegant concision. And so, you know, this is a book, it's not like an academic monograph. It's under 200 pages. Take my word for it. It's really an exceptional book, which is no surprise given how highly I think of her work more generally. Yeah. I mean, basically what this book is, is like an intellectual history of the anti-agalitarian tendency in American life. Basically, from the founding to the present, from the founding to the founders, the tech founders. We talk so much on the show in July, naturally about equality and the importance of equality and the American founding and its status over the course of the past 250 years. And this book is just a perfect compliment to those conversations, which is basically the other tradition, which has always been there, this counter tradition of people who want to preserve hierarchy, think equality is bad as such, and inequality is good. But it's taken on lots of different forms, some of which, you know, we've talked about on the show before, but putting it all together, both in the book, and I think in the conversation you're about to hear, it was extremely satisfying. Yes. It's not a book that's explicitly about the political right or the conservative movement,
Transcription truncated.
Matt and Sam talk to historian Kim Phillips-Fein about her new book, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America.
