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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.
This is correct. Wokeness is humanities academia fed through the incentive structure of social media. It's purpose is not to signal distinctiveness between blue and red, but between impure blues and properly pure blues. It originates with the overproduced elites on the margin looking for ways to distinguish themselves or get their peers ejected so they can win the next round of musical chairs on their way to tenure. It took existing liberal ideas and upped the extremity to the necessary point to distinguish themselves from other blue tribers.
I think right wingers really misunderstand the role of the institutional democratic party in wokeness. The Democratic Party has to get the votes of an aging electorate in an electoral system designed to over represent rural people. Academia, the entertainment industry and social media back in the 2010s all have much stronger incentives to appeal to the sensibilities of young educated people then the Democratic Party. The Democratic party gets dragged in the direction of wokeness by it's young election campaign staff working a year or two as a career stepping atone but the people invested in it's long term success understand who they have to appeal to.
Obama wasn't pro-gay Marriage in 2008. He ran on an 'all of the above' energy policy and presided over a massive shale boom and a 74% increase in oil production. He isn't responsible for the shale drilling revolution, but he didn't stop it either. He's a competent politician who understands that increasing gas prices is political suicide and the path to cutting emissions is keeping gas prices stable while subsidizing clean energy.
People forget that after George Floyd mainstream Democratic outlets weren't pushing defund the police they were pushing 'eight can't wait', a series of modest police reforms like banning chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles. Deray McKessen went on Pod Save America, the Bill Simmons podcast and GQ, he got written up by Vox and endorsed by Ariana Grande and Oprah. This got rolled into the George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill the Democratic house passed in 2020 which had a national registry of police misconduct and an end to qualified immunity but didn't cut police funding. But this activist campaign for police reforms got absolutely wiped out by the attention grabbing divisiveness of 'Defund the Police' which took over Twitter and social media. Obama as a competent politician criticized the slogan as an expensive signal saying "do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?"
Might be against the rules to high-five, but this struck me as spot on.
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