WEALTH IN AMERICA

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

Country of Lords (Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America.) 

Author: Kim Phillips-Fein

Narration by: Sarah Welborn

Kim Phillips-Fein argues the widening gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else in America is because of American culture’s anti-egalitarian beliefs and tradition. Beginning with the Founding Fathers of America; i.e., John Adams, Alexander Hamiliton, and Thomas Jefferson, Phillips-Fein’s argues these 3 men set the table for America to become anti-egalitarian. In part, she has a point because these three were elitists with university educations. However, she neglects to mention that George Washington was largely self-educated and seems unlikely to have been anti-egalitarian. However, despite Washington’s limited education and his role as a military leader, he is unlikely to have disagreed with Adams, Hamilton, or Jefferson.

As the author points out Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson believed in a “natural aristocracy” that would improve society. Of course, this idea comes from white American Founders that gave little weight to non-white races, believed in slavery, and white male superiority. Phillips-Fein explains these foundational beliefs held great influence in American society. The growth of industry labor biases is magnified by intellectual distortions of Darwinian evolution. The author goes on to explain influential Americans like Willam Sumner (an influential American social theorist in the 19th century) opposed welfare because of belief in Darwin’s discovery of natural selection and the concept of “survival of the fittest”. American economic growth and the rise of personal white male wealth diminish the status of laborers, women, and non-white Americans.

Andrew Carnegie (a steel magnate who created America’s first billion-dollar corporation) writes an essay titled “The Gospel of Wealth” in 1889 which argues the rich should rule because their wealth came from their natural superiority. Henry Ford creates his fortune in the automobile industry with a rigid hierarchy based on paternalistic control of workers’ labor and domestic lives. The outgrowth of industrial success in America leads authors like Madison Grant to racialize society with a belief that the white race is biologically superior. People like Charles Davenport (an American biologist who died in 1944) espoused a eugenics movement with a belief that poverty and crime are based on heredity which reinforces illogical beliefs of leaders like Adolph Hitler.

The author explains distortions of science and the advance of IQ testing have led to the rise of technocrats and corporate hierarchies based on preferential promotion and ascension of mostly white American men. Corporations grew to become quasi-governments that reinforced anti-egalitarianism. A meritocracy grows with sociologically biased IQ testing as a way to reinforce inequality based on cognitive difference rather than experience, proven, and/or innate ability.

Consequence of inequality of opportunity. Octavia Butler (a highly regarded American writer who died in 2006) shows an evolution of cities into silos of cultural difference rather than communities of common interest.

The irony of Phillips-Fein’s history of American thinkers and elites is that because people are not equal, they should not have equal opportunities. She notes people like John Adams believed too much egalitarianism is dangerous because it would empower the wrong people; i.e. presumably poorly educated Americans (ironically people like George Washington). The growth of racism and belief in eugenics by people like Lothrop Stoddard (a Harvard educated historian who died in 1950) argue that equal opportunity is foolish because laborers and particularly non-whites are less educated and equal to people who have acquired great wealth. The effects of that belief reinforce the false belief that wealth is a measure of human worth. That false belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that creates a perennial underclass that is denied an equal opportunity to improve their lives.

After this depressing history, Phillips-Fein suggests anti-egalitarianism in not a permanent, unchangeable characteristic of American democracy. Social Darwinism is collapsing as its distortions of evolution are better understood. The proof of Jewish contribution to society will never offset the horror of Adolph Hitler’s holocaust but few rational human beings can fail to see how important Jewish culture has been to science and the advance of civilization. The movements of abolitionists, labor, civil rights, feminists, immigrant and disability rights in the 20th and 21st centuries encourage egalitarian beliefs.

American democracy is like a giant ship at sea. It takes time to turn a giant ship impeded by brief storms until the return of calmer seas. America is weathering a Trumpian storm today but there is reason to believe there is another Lincolnesque or Rooseveltian leader in America’s future.