Episode
Kim Phillips-Fein on the Anti-Egalitarian Strain in American Culture and Politics
- Podcast
- LARB Radio Hour
- Published
- Jul 24, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2618
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://lareviewofbooks.libsyn.com/kim-phillips-fein-on-the-anti-egalitarian-strain-in-american-culture-and-politics
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/larb-radio-hour-174262/episodes/kim-phillips-fein-on-the-anti-egalitarian-strain-in-american-culture-and-politics/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/larb-radio-hour-174262/kim-phillips-fein-on-the-anti-egalitarian-strain-in-american-culture-and-politics.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Host Eric Newman and LARB Editor-in-Chief Medaya Ocher speak with Columbia history professor Kim Phillips-Fein about her new book Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America . Phillips-Fein examines a powerful countertradition that has challenged our well-mythologized national ideal of equality from the United States's founding to today. Moving from accounts about John Adams and William Graham Sumner to Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Peter Thiel, she traces how these and other influential figures defended hierarchy and sought to normalize inequality as a defining and even necessary feature of the American experiment.