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

A Pulitzer-finalist historian charts a 250-year-old intellectual and political tradition—the conviction that all Americans are NOT created equal.

The story of American history is often told as a hard-won march toward the promise of equality, derived from Thomas Jefferson’s famous proclamation that “all men are created equal.”

But this inspiring story obscures a parallel tradition: an enduring and organized argument against equality itself. Again and again, influential Americans have asserted ...