The UFC Cage Match Theory of Democracy

In June, a huge, eight-sided cage went up on the South Lawn of the White House, obscuring the façade of the storied building President Donald Trump has treated as his personal mansion. Intended for an Ultimate Fighting Championship series of mixed martial arts matches held on the president’s 80th birthday, the structure was Trump’s gift to himself, capping a months-long binge of relentlessly gaudifying America’s highest office. Naysayers were reminded that the event was, of course, also a celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday. The invite-only spectacle, with a price tag of over $60 million, had around 4,000 guests, with thousands more watching on big screens in the White House Ellipse. In a TikTok video, Trump compared his arena to the Eiffel Tower and mused that it might never come down.

Kim Phillips-Fein. Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America. Norton, 304 pp.

No better time, then, to remind ourselves that it was precisely during the month of June, 250 years ago, that Thomas Jefferson, in the sweltering heat of an early Philadelphia summer, was drafting the Declaration of Independence. The three truths Jefferson considered “self-evident”––“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—seem not so assured anymore. Maybe they never really were, suggests Kim Phillips-Fein, the liberal historian, in Country of Lords, her sweeping new study of the fate of the first of Jefferson’s hallowed truths: equality, or, as she defines it, “egalitarianism.”

Even as Jefferson was imagining, in Lincoln’s wonderful phrase, the “electric cord” of equality binding together his new nation, some of his contemporaries were severing it. Fellow founder John Adams called attempts to erase the natural differences between the rich and the poor a “glaring … imposition.” He was not alone in his concerns: The majority of states initially tied the right to vote to property ownership. A crucial test case for arguments in favor of equality was, of course, chattel slavery. Jefferson had already failed it, holding on to his slaves even as he proclaimed his gospel of egalitarianism. As Phillips-Fein mentions, he had some ugly things to say about Black people in his Notes on the State of Virginia: “In reason much inferior” to Whites, he wrote, they would never understand “the investigations of Euclid.”

As Phillips-Fein demonstrates, such observations set the stage for later defenses. Slavery was unavoidable, “too universal not to be necessary to nature,” intoned George Fitzhugh, the social theorist and Virginia planter, in 1854. If everyone kept their place in society, the overall result would be “peace and good will.” And here the opposition to the equality doctrine began to take on a different, more sinister hue. Having the protection of a master, apologists for slavery insisted, was preferable to being left to one’s own devices in the North, where, nominally free, you’d struggle to survive. Put differently, inequality is good for you—an argument Phillips-Fein also traces in subsequent refutations of egalitarianism offered by industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. An unsettling photograph included in Phillips-Fein’s book, taken on July 30, 1938, Ford’s 75th birthday, shows German diplomats pinning the Grand Cross of the German Eagle—the highest Nazi honor given to non-Germans—on the lapel of the rabidly antisemitic, anti-union millionaire.

Historians often emphasize the centrality of racial prejudice to anti-egalitarian thinking. Phillips-Fein, by contrast, is more interested in the latter’s antidemocratic core. But racism and rejection of democracy are one and the same. Consider one of the main perpetrators of racialist theory, not mentioned in Phillip-Fein’s book, the Harvard professor Louis Agassiz. An immigrant fresh from the mountains of Switzerland, Agassiz established the first seaside laboratory in America, founded the first scientifically organized natural history museum, and inaugurated the first genuine graduate school at an American university. A fervent anti-evolutionist, Agassiz also believed that the human races were biologically distinct, and he endeavored to provide evidence of that in around 200 photographs he collected in 1865 of mixed-race, indigenous, and Black people in Manaus, Brazil, where he traveled at the end of the Civil War. Agassiz served as an expert witness for Lincoln’s Freedmen Inquiry Commission, advising its members to leave newly freed Black people toiling in the South, where, well-adapted to the climate, they were also safely removed from the possibility of mating with white Americans and thus impoverishing the nation’s white genetic stock. “He thinks there were several Adams and Eves,” sighed the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his journal after he had attended a lecture by Agassiz on “The Races of Men.”

One depressing takeaway from Phillips-Fein’s book is how many Americans recognized the absurdity of anti-egalitarianism yet did little to stop it in practice. As in a game of whack-a-mole, the ugly specter of white supremacy pops up again and again in American history just when one thinks it has been destroyed. In March 1929, W.E.B. Du Bois agreed to a public debate with the professional racist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, one of the least appealing figures in a book brimming with them. Du Bois and Stoddard were to answer the question: “Shall the negro be encouraged to seek cultural equality?” (Du Bois: “Yes.” Stoddard: “No.”) Before 5,000 spectators at the Chicago Coliseum, Du Bois mopped the floor with Stoddard, whose incoherent protestations were drowned out by the crowd’s laughter.

Stoddard certainly looked the part. The poster for the event, reprinted in Phillips-Fein’s book, features him with slicked-back hair and a sculpted mustache that appears pasted on, making him seem like a blend of Douglas Fairbanks and Count Dracula. Mounting opposition to eugenics sounded the death knell for his ideas. Later advocates of inequality presented a more benign face to the world: The economist Milton Friedman, for example, the epitome of everyone’s favorite uncle (his smiling portrait in the book, at least for a moment, lifts the reader’s spirits), believed that if we’d just let the free market do its thing, everything would work out. “I am not in favor of egalitarianism, in the sense of equal results,” he told his hosts in South Africa in 1976 (in a speech not cited by Phillips-Fein). “I see no merit in cutting down a tree in a forest that grows higher than the others in order to make them all equal.” Leave the big trees intact, Friedman implied, and they will deliver shade to the smaller ones. Which, in the case of South Africa, also meant, of course, that the way to end apartheid, which Friedman did not endorse, was through capitalism, not reform.

For the psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray, social equality was a genetic impossibility and could not be rectified by public programs. In The Bell Curve (1994), one of the decade’s bestselling books, Herrnstein and Murray claimed that differences in people’s inherited IQs produced different economic outcomes, which just happened to correlate with familiar racial divisions. (Their handling of the data they used has been widely challenged). True, everyone can find their place in the world, they wrote, even “if you aren’t very smart.” The problem was that, as “women of low average intelligence” would continue to spawn hordes of unintelligent children, that fatal IQ gap was only going to widen, heightening the risk that a significant part of the population would end up as “wards of the state.” Herrnstein and Murray’s recommendation: cut the welfare programs.

Bashing American higher education—especially the humanities—has become a recreational activity across the political spectrum these days. Yet no has come up with a better way of teaching young people how to “govern themselves,” as John Dewey once put it.

Any remaining doubts about the sinister effects of anti-egalitarianism are dispelled in Phillips-Fein’s apocalyptic last chapter. Ostensibly about Trump enabler and J.D. Vance patron Peter Thiel, it demonstrates how the techno-reactionaries of Silicon Valley have been dreaming up a nation of AI-enhanced drones, compliant servants of a market that is itself a mega-machine. At least three of the self-made kings atop the new tyranny of tech—Thiel, Elon Musk, and David Sachs, Trump’s chief science advisor—were shaped by their upbringing in apartheid South Africa. For them, democracy, as a tool for resolving human conflicts, has no appeal. They prefer meritocracy, the rule of the nimble over the daft. The Meritocracy Fellowships, inaugurated by Alex Karp, the CEO of the software firm Palantir, attempt to siphon top talent from American universities, the “college industrial complex,” as Karp dismisses it, that dulls young people into believing they are all the same.

Country of Lords is an important, courageous book. That said, I wish that Phillips-Fein had given more thought to how we might slow down our descent into mindless capitulation to authoritarianism. In her conclusion, she praises the antidote to the unthinking acceptance of inequality: “the ideas that inspired Abraham Lincoln, Eugene V. Debs, Clara Lemlich, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr.” Those ideas still carry, she believes, the promise “that we may yet, one day, create a world that lives up, in whatever way it can, to the radical demand that we are all created equal.” (Note the many syntactic interruptions here, reminding us that it’s just that—a promise). I would propose that the best way to make egalitarianism more than a shaky promise has been, and continues to be, through college, where students are regularly exposed to the ideas Philipp-Fein mentions. Bashing American higher education—especially the humanities—has become a recreational activity across the political spectrum these days. Yet no has come up with a better way of teaching young people how to “govern themselves,” as John Dewey once put it.

It was, as it happens, in Karp’s “college industrial complex” that I first read the novel that now helps me make sense of that awful cage on the White House lawn, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner’s protagonist, the planter Thomas Sutpen, builds a mansion in the middle of nowhere, a tawdry symbol of his power. At night, he holds “raree shows” in his barn: brutal fights in which he pits his slaves, like “game cocks,” against each other, entering, for the grand finale, the ring himself, “naked, panting, and bloody.” Trump is no Thomas Sutpen. But he is driven by the same visceral need to assure himself of his own place as the nation’s Cock-of-the-Rock. Last month at the President’s birthday party on taxpayer grass, any semblance of the promise of egalitarianism on which this nation was founded had vanished. Instead, uniformity reigned. The fighters wore specially designed outfits in red, white, and blue that, according to The New York Times, made it seem they were all on the same team. Trump, the self-described “perfect specimen,” sat in the front row.

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