President Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement have been a disaster for American politics and have corrupted our culture in ways that may take decades to repair. But as with Nazism and Stalinism, this abhorrent ideology has also inspired talented writers to figure out why and how it has emerged and triumphed. Scholars are particularly keen to examine a long tradition of “illiberal” ideas and policies that our egregious President and his followers seek to emulate. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt focus on the allure of authoritarian leaders who deny the legitimacy of their opponents and encourage their followers to commit violence for an allegedly righteous cause. The historian Steven Hahn argues that racist institutions and the perennial hatred of immigrants and religious minorities keep undermining the fragile achievements of pluralism and individual rights. The revival of similar mass pathologies in Europe and elsewhere has even spawned a new academic field: In 2020, George Washington University launched a program in “illiberalism studies.” It sports branches in Paris and Rome and publishes a peer-reviewed journal.

In Country of Lords, Kim Phillips-Fein, who teaches history at Columbia University, highlights a rather different aspect of the illiberal belief system: the denial of equality, as either a reality or a goal. Those figures in the book, she writes, argued “that a hierarchical society based on stable, fixed social classes—with enormous concentrations of wealth at the top—was the ideal to which the United States should aspire.” In a text of less than 200 pages, Phillips-Fein fluently describes the ideas of prominent Americans from John Adams to Peter Thiel who have made the case for natural hierarchy in a variety of ways. All sought to stop the common folk from interfering with the rule of men who prided themselves on possessing the genes, the expertise, or simply the iron will to use power to rule or boss everyone else.

Phillips-Fein could have gone even further back, to the dawn of American history, when elitists claimed divine sanction for their view. “God Almighty in his most holy and wise providence,” penned John Winthrop in 1630 on the ship taking him and his fellow Puritans to what became Massachusetts, “hath soe disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in submission.” He had left a country run by titled lords who persecuted his dissenting sect. But Winthrop was certain that the Lord still blessed the rigidity of class societies.

Some of the figures who do appear on Phillips-Fein’s roster fit the profile of arrogant authority as snugly as a Gucci glove. During the Gilded Age, the sociologist William Graham Sumner articulated an undiluted Social Darwinism that captivated his upper-class undergraduates at Yale as well as the readers of highbrow magazines. “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be,” he declared in 1883. “Nature is working away at him to get him out of the way, just as she sets up her processes of dissolution to remove whatever is a failure in its line.” In the 1920s, Lothrop Stoddard, who had earned a history Ph.D at Harvard, drew on Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch and ethnic stereotypes grounded in bigoted science for his book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, in which he warned that people of color endangered the dominance of the “Nordic” race. “It’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it,” touts Tom Buchanan, the abusive moneyed villain in The Great Gatsby. “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be…utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” If all the characters in Country of Lords were like Sumner and Stoddard, the story Phillips-Fein tells could be shrunk to the size of an op-ed.

However, she is too good a historian to confine herself to the obvious. What makes her treatment of this subject compelling is the inclusion of men who believed quite sincerely that a hierarchy of the successful advanced the well-being of all. John Adams thought “a natural Aristocracy among men” enabled an educated elite to govern society benignly as the majority performed its labors. The steel baron Andrew Carnegie preached that wealthy men like himself should contribute lavishly to philanthropic endeavors; he financed more than 2,800 public libraries around the globe and endowed institutions to advance education and peace. Henry Ford believed it absurd “to insist that all men are equal,” yet he doubled wages for men on his pioneering assembly line who could live up to his standards of good conduct—which excluded heavy drinkers, the unmarried, and immigrants who neglected to attend classes to learn English—to $5 a day. In part an effort to reduce staff turnover, this policy enabled thousands to purchase the Model-Ts they were making. (It also sapped their desire to unionize.)

Capsule biographies in the book suggest a reason why several of these figures adopted their hierarchical convictions despite themselves overcoming mean childhoods on their path to prominence. The fathers of both Sumner and Carnegie were weavers whose livelihood got crushed by industrial looms. Ford grew up on a farm and worked as a machinist as a teenager. Ayn Rand, the only woman in Phillips-Fein’s antipantheon, rooted her hatred of any restrictions on capital in the Bolsheviks’ expropriation of her father’s pharmacy in St. Petersburg. These self-made inegalitarians believed they were among the small number of people who had the brains, relentless work ethic, and discipline to achieve wealth and fame. Ordinary men and women who spurned their example should be content to stay in their place and cede all power to their natural-born lords.

In her short book, Phillips-Fein manages something few historians achieve in much longer ones: the perceptive portrait of a consequential worldview that has evolved since the early years of the republic while retaining its essential elements of thought. Her last chapter makes clear that “tech utopians” like Thiel and Marc Andreessen believe just as much in the survival of the fittest as did Sumner. But for them, what drives the evolution of the species is the ability to invent, harness, and make billions from machines that fuel growth and harvest all knowledge of the past, present, and future. “Tech inventors and company founders perched at the top of the human hierarchy” see themselves as “those rare human beings who have the capacity to touch the divine,” Phillips-Fein writes.

She writes far less about the political influence of the equality haters than about their ability to gain headlines and write bestselling books. Her first book, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, narrated, quite brilliantly, the ways in which corporate bigwigs mobilized within the Republican Party from the 1930s to the ’80s—first to oppose the welfare state and organized labor and then to elect Ronald Reagan and his ilk to run America. In Country of Lords, she claims the arguments made by her protagonists “ultimately come to shape the broader politics of the country.” And men like Ford and Thiel certainly “were responsible for inventions and companies that…did reshape society while making them extraordinarily wealthy.”

But I wish Phillips-Fein had examined how and when these apostles of inequality, whether corporate or literary, influenced who got elected and the policies they enacted once in office. Her analysis of the noxious ideas of the “lords” is thoroughly convincing. But the lack of detail about how useful their notions were in deciding winners and losers in matters of state suggests the limits of how much they have lorded over our history.

Of course, the United States has never been a society of equals, but candidates who betray condescension toward ordinary people do not fare well in our real, if imperfect, democracy. In 1796, state legislators, not individual voters, chose most of the electors who gave Adams his single presidential term. No one who publicly agreed with his distaste for popular rule ever made it to the White House again. Henry Ford won the nonbinding Republican primary in Michigan in 1916 but then announced he had no desire to run for the presidency. Even if he had changed his mind in the 1920s, the flagrant antisemitism he then espoused in his weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, would probably have destroyed his chances. In 2012, when video leaked of Mitt Romney dismissing the 47 percent of Americans too poor to pay income tax—“I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”—it confirmed his image as a haughty financier and helped ensure the reelection of Barack Obama.

In their rise to power, the leaders of the modern conservative movement usually cast aside figures who doubted the virtue and wisdom of the common folk. As editor of National Review, William F. Buckley denounced Rand’s ferocious atheism and ran a famous review by Whittaker Chambers of one of her books that concluded, “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’” As governor of California and then President, Reagan spoke of most Americans in populist terms that echoed Franklin D. Roosevelt, the political hero of his youth. “The people have made it plain,” the conservative icon told a college audience back in 1981. “They want an end to excessive government intervention in their lives and in the economy. They want an end to burdensome and unnecessary regulations and to a punitive tax policy that takes ‘from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.’”

Donald Trump and his MAGA disciples are the heirs of this tradition on the right more than the one dissected in Country of Lords. They blame elitists in the “deep state” and the “fake news media” for mocking and seeking to undermine the common folks’ patriotism and religious values. As it was for Reagan and his kind, their definition of “the people” who deserve aid from government and a measure of power in it extends mainly to citizens of European heritage. To paraphrase Orwell’s Animal Farm, Trumpists believe some Americans are far more equal than others—and extend that honor solely to those who agree with whatever the flamboyant octogenarian says or does. The fact that their hero and his family have greatly expanded their fortunes while he’s been President and that he helps his fellow billionaires do the same has not shaken their loyalty, at least not as of the summer of 2026.

Right-wing populists like Trump cannot openly disparage the people they want to recruit and represent any more than can their counterparts on the left. Both groups have to navigate a tension between the advocacy of equal rights and outcomes for those on their side and a yen to punish the elites on the other side whom they accuse of betraying that ideal.

For progressives, the long tradition Phillips-Fein narrates might yield a lesson both sober and hopeful. On the one hand, the complex hierarchies of class, race, and gender have bedeviled every attempt to mobilize a durable majority to support egalitarian ends. Fifteen years ago, Occupy Wall Street uprisers proclaimed that the key divide among Americans was between the 99 percent and the 1 percent. But that was clearly just an aspirational slogan, albeit a catchy one. It has not yet animated a movement that could transform the economic and political order that benefits wealthy Americans more than ordinary men and women.

Yet, in preaching the virtues of equality, vital gains have been won. Without an appeal to the leveling angels of our nation, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to enact universal policies like the Fair Labor Standards Act, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and laws to protect the environment. One can acknowledge the yawning gap between equality as a principle and equality as a social fact but still organize with passion and intelligence to transform a system that usually lets billionaires act any way they damn please. It may take a secular great awakening to humble and vanquish Trump, Elon Musk, and their ilk. But earlier such awakenings did much to abolish slavery, build a mass labor movement, and advance freedom for Black Americans and women. If we do not believe “a change is gonna come,” as Sam Cooke sang in 1963, it never will.