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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.
Is "Luxury Beliefs" just the right-wing version of "voting against their own interests"? @hydroacetylene makes this more explicit:
Have you considered in your disagreements with your political opponents about policy the merest possibility that they might be right (or at least correctly accomplishing their own goals which may differ from yours)?
Absolutely not. Have you?
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The actual policy changes after the 2020 protests have been pretty much entirely in the "tough-on-crime" direction. I understand there's serious disagreement over how or if to reform law enforcement, but most of BLM's recommendations haven't been implemented anywhere---and certainly not the recommendations of the prison abolition movement---so I don't see how you could possibly blame the murder rate on them.
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No. Having a luxury belief isn't against your own interests. The whole point is that it's not against your own interests because you have the resources to make it not be so.
Wanting to abolish the police when you live in a high crime neighborhood is voting against your own interests. Wanting to abolish the police when you live in a private gated community that has no crime anyway and you make money from selling private security services isn't against your own interests at all, and is a prime example of a luxury belief.
And it would be possible to have a luxury belief in the other political direction. For instance, claiming that it's wrong to work on Sundays for religious reasons, when you have a good job that never requires working on Sunday anyway.
Most of what hydroxyacetylene is saying seems to be disagreeing with how often luxury belief really happens.
I'm still confused; the context is talking about the not wealthy people trying to hold these "luxury beliefs" that they can't afford to and it's hurting them.
Wanting to abolish the police is voting against your interests only if abolishing the police actually increases crime that hurts you (worded vaguely because it's reasonable to claim, say, shoplifting in my neighborhood hurts me indirectly even though I'm not a direct victim of the crime). The progressive views on reforming law enforcement and the justice system usually talk about how they believe the desired changes would reduce crime (usually pointing to science saying so). I fully understand that most posters here disagree. But describing such things as "luxury beliefs" goes against the honest belief of those who hold them that they would make life better for everyone.
If a poor man wants to live in a rich man's mansion, we don't say "wants a mansion which would otherwise be a rich man's mansion, but which in this one case would be a poor man's mansion since a poor person would hypothetically be living in it".
It's just a semantics question. If you define a luxury belief as "is X for the person believing in it", then technically, it wouldn't be a luxury belief for that person, it would be a "thing which is a luxury belief when believed by other people, and which these people are imitating". But that's pedantry.
"Luxury belief" is not incompatible with honestly believing in something. What makes it a luxury belief is that you are, because you can afford to be, insulated from the bad consequences of that belief. You don't have to say "ha ha, I don't care what happens to poor people" in order for that to be true. You could just as well be sincerely (but incorrectly) generalizing from your own situation. Or you might just not be thinking things through at all.
I'm sure that most people in gated communities who want to abolish the police are sincere about it, and I'm also sure that abolishing the police wouldn't really hurt them.
I think we're talking past each other. For instance, I could just as easily describe "tough-on-crime" as a "luxury belief" because a common talking point of the pro-reform point of view is that doing so increases crime by unnecessarily putting people in prison so they build connections to criminals and pushing them away from the non-criminal economy, and therefore the rich isolated from crime can afford to revel in punishing criminals but the less isolated people in cities can't afford such beliefs. This would be an absurd way of structuring a political argument that is using the term "luxury beliefs" to sneak in an assumption that pro-reform view is correct. But I don't see any difference between that and any other uses of "luxury beliefs" in this thread.
If "tough on crime" was a belief commonly held by rich people and not poor people, that would be fair. I don't think it is.
There's nothing inherently impossible about a right-wing-coded luxury belief, see my example about working Sundays.
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That’s a pretty good summation of my posts, although I guess you can say ‘wealthy democrats usually go to church on Sundays, have children only within marriage, stay married, avoid illegal drug use, and seriously expect their teenagers to keep their pants on, and do such things at much higher rates than working class households of either political persuasion while attesting that these things which they obviously expend effort into doing are not important’ is a demonstration of luxury beliefs.
In any case, the fact that they do those things is evidence for not doing them to be a bad decision.
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