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Notes -
Against Luxury Beliefs
I'll link Henderson's entire post about Luxury Beliefs for reference, but for the purposes of this post I'll be focusing on his brief definition:
Henderson speaks of luxury beliefs like Scott's Barber Pole theory of fashion, using many of the same examples. Put shortly: "Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it."
He also frames it as a costly signal of wealth: "They can afford to (defund the police), because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security... Expressing a luxury belief is a manifestation of cultural capital, a signal of one’s fortunate economic circumstances."
There are two contrasting claims here. The first is that luxury beliefs impose a genuine cost on the believer that he can afford to bear, like a wastefully pronking gazelle. The second is that the believer does not actually suffer that cost due to his existing position. The wealthy people in all-white gated neighborhoods on private islands bear no additional cost after all the criminals are released on the streets of a far-away city.
I believe Henderson is wrong that these beliefs are a luxury of the upper classes, and that they are rather highly costly expressions of loyalty from an upper-middle-class "Outer Party."
Henderson's income chart for defunding the police has three categories: <$50k, $50-100k, and >$100k. Thanks to rapid income growth and inflation, these categories no longer separate neatly into lower, middle, and upper class. Most of the people with incomes over $100k are not the estate-dwelling ultra-rich, but urban professionals in precarious social and economic positions. Indeed, crime-vulnerable city-dwellers are almost three times as likely to support defunding the police as rural people.
The most radical beliefs expressed in the great "uprising and cultural reckoning" of 2020 came directly from the most precarious and poor members of high status white collar classes: journalists, teachers, librarians, adjunct professors, social workers, petty officials, job-hopping employees of bloated tech companies. None of them were aping Obama or other members of a higher class. And all of these people suffer serious costs because of their beliefs, whether from direct violence from the underclass or indirectly from general social breakdown.
The day after John Kerry bought a beachfront mansion next to Obama's (his Martha's Vineyard one, not his Hawaii one), a woman in tech told me she had led a costly project to remove their business from the Netherlands "because the whole country will be underwater soon, thanks to the Climate Crisis."
Obama installed a 2500 gallon propane tank and whole-mansion backup generator; she had her husband destroy the portable generator that came with their new home, and suffered winter power outages in dignified silence.
Obama's children (and the children of all his class) live completely normal lives, just with more polo lessons and hedge fund internships.
Yesterday this woman instagrammed her Pride Month Announcement: a photo of her five year old son in a dress.
Henderson says that "Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it." But Obama and the ultra-wealthy didn't create or model these dysfunctional and self-harming "luxury beliefs," only to abandon them once they became déclassé. They are entirely the product of a desperately status-poor and precarious outer party in a society where climbing the social latter requires winning a red queen's race of radicalism, caught in an increasingly rapid purity spiral. Those at the top pay little attention to the crab bucket below them, except perhaps to nudge the ladder a little further out of reach.
So why should we care? Because I think charging these people with hypocrisy is counterproductive, unless their name is Soros or their job title is "mayor" or higher. Most of them are not benefitting from these beliefs, and would be much happier not suffering under the constant pressure to one-up each other in expressing them.
I’ve got a couple of interesting(to me at least) observations about this general phenomenon-
ultra progressive positions are much, much less popular than you think they are. Defunding the police is probably less popular than sodomy laws or Texas style abortion bans. Most of the trans agenda polls at like 70-30 against. These positions are held by much smaller fractions of the population you think holds them than commonly believed.
I have a pet theory that wealthy educated people are simply more extreme most of the time. Your automechanic in Jacksonville statistically votes straight (R) in every election he shows up for, but he probably doesn’t support a six week abortion ban or permitless carry. And likewise shaniqua working at the McDonald’s he takes his lunch break at has far more political similarities with him than with the politicians she votes for. On the other hand college educated and high income Americans largely agree with the agendas of the parties they vote for. Both fundamentalist Christianity and ultra progressive spaces are mostly made up of high income people with college degrees, and realistically that indicates some impressive partisan polarization among wealthy degree holders.
Most progressives do not follow progressive beliefs in their personal lives- your median teacher is probably in a heterosexual marriage, seriously expects her children to abstain from promiscuity and not have sex at all until adulthood, goes to church every Sunday, and spent a few years out of the workforce to do childcare in spite of holding to progressive orthodoxy on political questions. Indeed, my own mother hit all the points above- I recall her both saying it was unfortunate that the state of Texas didn’t pass out condoms to high schoolers, and that I would be kicked out if I so much as kissed a girl(or boy, which she was clear she was fine with ‘but it would break your dad’s heart’) in the same conversation when I was beginning high school. In a real sense the far right are just rich college educated people who preach the values they live and the far left are just rich college educated people who live the values they preach(well ish, see below). This is partly because living progressive values is an impressively dumb decision that takes real and quasi-religious commitment, but still.
People who actually live far left woke lifestyles are a lot less functional and much poorer than people who don’t. Can’t remember the source, but LGBT people are actually really poor when you adjust for geography(functionally all of them live in cities) and trans people in particular are basically minimum wage slaves. Drug use, promiscuity, disability- all the things that wokes celebrate- all of them are associated with being poor and dysfunctional. Being non-binary and well educated seems mostly associated with having a heck of a lot of debt and probably some mental problems. And that’s without getting into things that have race as a confounder.
When I was growing up (c. 2010, middle-class Northeastern suburb), it was considered unusual but admirable to choose not to date in high school. The median parent understood that teenagers got horny and had sex, but wanted their children to know about the potential consequences. It produced a lot of rather deliberate teenagers. One friend sat down with a sheet of paper talking about the pros and cons of having sex, discussed at length potential contraceptives and failure rates, and considered getting an IUD. She was a senior in high school.
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