Podcast Explores America's Right-Wing Opposition to Equality

Know Your Enemy, a podcast examining the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell, has released a new episode featuring historian Kim Phillips-Fein. The episode centers on Phillips-Fein’s forthcoming book, *Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America*, which traces opposition to egalitarian ideals from the nation’s founding to contemporary figures such as tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

Phillips-Fein, a professor at New York University, is recognized for her scholarship on the political and economic forces that have shaped conservative thought. Her prior works include *Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal* (2009) and *Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics* (2017). In *Country of Lords*, she explores how proponents of slavery, biological racism, and laissez-faire industrial capitalism resisted the expansion of democracy and equality throughout U.S. history.

The podcast episode situates Phillips-Fein’s research within broader debates about American political thought. She engages with classic analyses such as Richard Hofstadter’s *The American Political Tradition* (1948) and Louis Hartz’s *The Liberal Tradition in America* (1955), while also responding to recent scholarship like Steven Hahn’s *Illiberal America: A History* (2024). By examining figures ranging from antebellum slaveholders to Gilded Age industrialists and modern tech elites, Phillips-Fein argues that resistance to equality has been a persistent, if shifting, undercurrent in American political life.

The conversation highlights how ideas once considered marginal—such as social Darwinism and aristocratic elitism—have periodically gained influence in policy and culture. Phillips-Fein emphasizes that opposition to equality was not confined to the South or to overt racists but was also championed by Northern industrialists and, in the 21st century, by Silicon Valley figures advocating for meritocratic oligarchy and technological determinism.

The episode serves as a companion to earlier *Know Your Enemy* discussions on Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence, broadening the lens to include those who explicitly rejected the nation’s egalitarian founding principles. Phillips-Fein’s historical perspective underscores the ongoing tension between democratic aspirations and hierarchical impulses in American society.

Listeners can access the episode on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and other platforms. The podcast also offers bonus content to supporters on Patreon. Phillips-Fein’s book, scheduled for publication in 2026, is poised to contribute to ongoing debates about inequality, power, and the ideological roots of contemporary conservatism.