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. A slice:
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.
National Review‘s John Puri points to “the ancient wisdom of free trade.” A slice:
Economic specialization is not a newfangled concept in the arc of human history, however. It has been with us since men hunted and women gathered.
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, explains that “China does present some real national security challenges. But the Trump administration’s policies have made it harder to address those, all while damaging American prosperity.” A slice:
For instance, an all-out trade war with just about every country certainly does not lessen our dependence on China. A July New York Times story described a small American flashlight importer that spent years pursuing supply from Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Then Trump’s latest tariffs put those countries’ rates at roughly the same level as the rate on Chinese goods, so the importer shifted back to his Chinese supplier. That’s Trump’s trade policy in one anecdote.
While we shouldn’t worry too much about where our flashlights come from, all of this makes America less safe. As scholar Samuel Gregg explains in a study for the American Institute for Economic Research, it boils down to the fact that military power rests on economic power. The United States outlasted the Soviet Union in part because a larger, faster-growing economy let it match Moscow’s defense spending while committing a smaller share of its output to the effort. Tariffs erode the U.S. advantage by raising costs for American producers and slowing growth, shrinking the economic base that funds the Pentagon.
Protectionism also costs us friends. Gregg points to the Morrill Tariff of 1861, which angered Britain (a country with every reason to back the Union against the slaveholding South) enough to settle into an uneasy Civil War neutrality. In recent weeks, Trump’s furious attack on Canada has not just alienated our closest neighbor, dependable trading partner, and NATO ally. It sent one friend running into the arms of China. Some might be eager to call the move stupid in the name of owning Trump. The more important reality is that it makes America weaker.
Finally, stretching the term “national security” to cover every steel mill and auto plant drains it of meaning. A government that calls everything a security threat will have trouble rallying allies, or voters, when a real one arrives.
George Will is right: right-wing religious “integralists” (such as J.D. Vance and Adrian Vermeule) share very much in common with Democratic Socialists and very little with America’s founding fathers. A slice:
Integralists illustrate the “horseshoe” rather than the linear conception of the political spectrum: Integralism and socialism bend toward each other. Vermeule: “Libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights will also have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources.”
“The bureaucracy,” Vermeule promises, “will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule,” protecting “atomized individuals” from, among other things, “corporate exploitation.” Where, one wonders, do the devout integralist vice president, JD Vance, and New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, differ concerning what the mayor calls “the warmth of collectivism”?
An integralist might oppose immigration and a socialist might oppose economic disparities for similar reasons: Both favor government-enforced social homogeneity. Neither agrees with Robert Frost, who opposed the urge to “homogenize society,” because, he said, “I want the cream to rise.”
Integralists who speak, as Vance does, of “the Christian foundation of this country” are baptizing the Founders without their permission. The six most important — Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton — held, tepidly, various flavors of deism, which says a clockmaker deity got the universe going, then His attention wandered. The six tended toward unitarianism, the watery belief that there is at most one God.
Integralists, like socialists, promise political transformations that will achieve salvation for our fallen world. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Integralists, like socialists, are more ambitious.
Kevin Williamson is not impressed with Trump’s recent speech at the U.N.
Learning to think, and to know what you are talking about, is a full-time occupation. Nowhere is this more true than in the formative years. Even naturally bright people can turn out to be nothing more than clever mush heads if the discipline of logic and the analytical dissection of many-sided empirical evidence is slighted for the sake of emotional “experiences.”
To place personal honor above the interests of the entire community was the behavior of a barbarian – or worse yet, a king.
To be sure, what people care about is sensitive to social context, and we should applaud institutions that encourage people to care for each other. But telling people that they are required to tend someone else’s garden rather than their own does not encourage people to care for each other. It does the opposite. It encourages spite.
