‘Ordinary people bear the brunt of luxury beliefs’

We all know a ‘luxury belief’ when we see one. ‘Defund the police’, ‘abolish the family’ or ‘white privilege’ are ideas you’re far more likely to encounter on an Ivy League campus than in a trailer park or a pub. The term was coined by writer and commentator Rob Henderson to describe views that confer status on the elites, while inflicting huge costs on the rest of us. So why do the well-off and well-educated gravitate towards such clearly nonsensical views? Henderson sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers last week to discuss his problem with luxury beliefs and his new memoir, Troubled. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the full thing here.

Fraser Myers: What was the political climate like when you first arrived at Yale University as an undergraduate? Was it a culture shock?

Rob Henderson: I arrived at Yale in 2015, right at this inflection point. A lot of people will know the mid-2010s was this strange period in higher education. This is the birth of what people now call cancel culture or wokeness.

I saw students calling for professors to be fired, challenging academic freedom and freedom of expression. I heard unusual viewpoints that I’d never heard before. They would say things like, we should shut down prisons, we need to abandon this concept of monogamous marriage, we should legalise all drugs. You could call it idealistic. But to me, it seemed an impractical and almost foolish view of how society works.

In between those experiences, I was reading a lot about how social class operates and about the cyclical nature of status. How once beliefs become fashionable and widespread, the people at the top subsequently abandon them and move on to something else. I saw this occurring in real time at Yale. This is where the ‘Defund the Police’ movement came from. That idea originated in elite universities, before we saw it spread later throughout the rest of the media and then to society.

That’s why I call such ideas ‘luxury beliefs’. They are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper classes, while inflicting costs on the less fortunate.

Myers: Did the ideas you encountered at Yale – like ‘white privilege’, for instance – strike you as sensible when you first encountered them?

Henderson: Not really. I grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles, where most of my foster siblings were Hispanic or black. There were a couple of white kids. It was very diverse. When I was adopted, I moved to an impoverished part of northern California in Tehama County, one of the poorest counties in the state. It was mostly white and working class. There were some Hispanics, too, but it was just a lot of poverty. That poverty mattered much more than race or ethnicity.

When I joined the military, there were working-class and lower-middle-class white people who I served with. Then I got to Yale, where people believed that you have this special amulet of privilege because you’re white. None of it made sense to me. There are more students at Yale from the top one per cent of the income scale than the entire bottom 60 per cent. Even the students of colour at elite universities by and large come from upper-middle-class families.

I found that it was the white students who were the most enthused about this idea of white privilege. To me, there was this twisted kind of pride in it. It was like they found a certain satisfaction in being able to say ‘I’m white and I’m privileged, it’s so bad’. Yet they were indirectly elevating themselves by talking about this. They weren’t losing status by saying that they have this privilege. They were actually increasing their status even more by acknowledging it. It felt very disingenuous to me.

Myers: One of the recurring themes in your memoir is how difficult life was without a stable family. Yet there are many among the woke who say that family is oppressive and monogamy is outdated. Could that be the most damaging luxury belief?

Henderson: This is borne out in empirical research. The number one predictor of graduating from university is being raised by two married parents. That was certainly the case for almost every person I met at Yale. And yet, if you look at who is the least likely to support the idea that children should be raised by two married parents, it’s people who have university degrees and earn six figure incomes. They overwhelmingly follow that conventional bourgeois life track.

Most people who hold these beliefs don’t have malicious intent. They’re just going with the flow. They’re drawn to ideas that are fashionable, will win them favour among their friends and seem, at first glance, to be compassionate. But there are 10 or maybe 20 per cent of people who promote these beliefs with more sinister intentions. They think that the family itself is some kind of oppressive structure. But often, when you look at their own lives, they were raised by intact families.

The core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. When you have resources, education and social capital, even if you do indulge in novel lifestyle choices – like living in a polycule or doing drugs or attempting to live in a dangerous neighbourhood – you’re protected.

Myers: A view like ‘defund the police’ presents itself as being caring, particularly for racial minorities who might have been harmed by the police. But for people in poor areas, isn’t crime a bigger problem than police brutality?

Henderson: When representative samples of Americans were asked, ‘Should we defund the police?’, it was the highest-income Americans who were the most supportive. The lowest-income Americans were the least supportive. White Democrats were the most enthusiastic about defunding the police, but black and Hispanic Democrats were the least supportive.

Yet a lot of media and cultural elites will appoint members of these communities – who themselves often went to elite universities – to speak on behalf of these oppressed groups. We spend a lot of time listening to these activists, but very few of us will actually go into those communities or look at the survey data.

As a result of defunding the police in 2020, crime increased. Violent crime in particular skyrocketed. Homicides increased across the board. Most of the victims were poor, marginalised, ethnic minorities.

Whenever luxury beliefs are put into practice, the elites are the least likely to incur the costs. The rest of us bear the brunt of it.

Rob Henderson was talking to Fraser Myers. Watch to the full conversation here: