Why Many Elites Denigrate the Very Values That Made Them Successful | Rob Henderson

This episode will premiere on July 2, 2026 at 9 p.m. ET.

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Rob Henderson grew up in poverty in Los Angeles moving from foster home to foster home, seeing addiction, instability, and family breakdown all around him. He joined the U.S. Air Force at 17, entered Yale University at 25 with help from the GI Bill, and completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He climbed “every rung on the American class ladder,” as he describes it.

But at Yale and other elite universities, he saw the spread of radical ideas—abolish the police, empty prisons, dismantle marriage, decriminalize all drugs—ideas that he understood would be devastating to the communities he grew up in.

And that’s how he came to develop his now famous concept of luxury beliefs: “Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent … while inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society,” he says.

How is it that these ideas came to be so pervasive? And what are their true consequences for society?

Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal, and bestselling author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Rob Henderson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Rob Henderson:

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Rob, your concept of luxury beliefs has been very helpful to me over the years. It’s a beautiful little way of thinking about a whole range of, perhaps you could call it, ideology. I want to look at how you actually came to understand this idea and build it out, and I know your background fits into this. Why don’t you give me a picture of that?

Mr. Henderson:

With the luxury beliefs idea, I started thinking about it when I was in college and developed it in grad school. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent and the credentialed while inflicting costs on less fortunate members of society—people lower on the socioeconomic ladder. A core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief, hence luxury. 

The basic idea here is that historically, elites exhibited their status, their high social rank, with luxury goods—expensive material possessions. Now, material goods are a noisier signal of social status. We live in an age where anyone can get an iPhone. You can go to certain outlets and buy expensive clothes, or clothes that used to be expensive, off the rack. So, compared to 100 years ago, if you look around, who’s rich, who’s poor, it’s harder to identify by appearance alone.

Now, what affluent and credentialed people have done, cultural elites, is they exhibit their status through luxury beliefs instead of luxury goods. And these beliefs signal certain kinds of information about them. It sub-communicates what kind of family you grew up in, the kinds of socioeconomic status you hold, what kind of college you went to, what kind of job you have, and the amount of cultural capital you possess. I arrived at this idea, you know, I mentioned it started to sort of form in my mind in college. 

Before college, before I set foot on campus, my life was very different. I grew up in poverty in Los Angeles, in foster homes, and never knew my father. I was taken from my mother when I was three years old. My mom was Korean, and came to the U.S. Her life very quickly unraveled; she suffered from drug addiction. I lived through a series of foster homes and a bunch of chaotic and difficult adverse situations. I fled as soon as I could. I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force when I was 17. 

Then, with some hiccups and some setbacks along the way, I finally arrived at Yale at age 25 as an undergraduate studying on the GI Bill. And during this process, I sort of climbed every rung on the American class ladder. I was born about as poor as you can be in a developed, first-world country and then lived through a kind of series of working-class, lower-middle-class homes as a kid.

In the military, I started encountering middle-class people, and then by the time I got to Yale, I was around sort of upper-middle-class and wealthy individuals. During these experiences, I noticed opinions and beliefs would differ along the way. At Yale, I heard beliefs that I’d never encountered before, things like: abolish the police. We need to end incarceration. Empty the prisons. We should promote polyamory. We should dismantle any kind of conventional or traditional ideas of marriage. We need to decriminalize all drugs. 

And all of these ideas that are popular among elites, they had an effect on the communities that I grew up in. And, you know, I saw a lot of suffering, a lot of addiction, a lot of abuse, a lot of neglect and abandonment, and so on. As a student, both in college and then later at the University of Cambridge for my PhD, I read a lot of papers on the sociology of class, the psychology of social status, and I encountered some shocking statistics.

One, for example, if you go back to 1960 and you look at the number of kids in the U.S. (same in the U.K., by the way), the number of kids who are raised by two married parents in 1960 is identical across the socioeconomic spectrum. Rich kids and poor kids alike, 95 percent of the kids were raised by two married parents.

Fast forward to 2005, when I was a kid and I was in high school. For upper and upper-middle-class kids, it declined slightly from 95 percent in 1960 to 85 percent by 2005. So a slight decline, 95 to 85 percent. Now if you look at poor and working-class kids, it dropped from 95 percent to 30 percent by 2005. And so now if you visit a lot of working-class, blue-collar, impoverished areas. Seeing kids in what the idea of the family is, that’s an anomaly. 

Now, you know, I grew up in the kinds of, I was in foster homes. I think about my friends who I grew up with, but another friend who was raised by his single father, two friends raised by single mothers, another friend raised by his grandmother because his mom was addicted to drugs and his dad was in prison. That’s kind of the norm now in these communities of kids in these fragmented, unstable family environments.

Then I get to Yale and I’m seeing people, the majority of whom are raised by two married parents, who personally have lived very traditional kinds of lives. Their parents and their families valued education and family, hard work, integrity, punctuality, law-abidingness. They lived like they were conservatives. 

But then when I heard them express their views, it was, again, sort of, let’s move beyond marriage, defund the police. If you want to use drugs, that’s okay. It’s a very sort of hands-off, nonjudgmental attitude about how you should live your life. If you want to understand the luxury beliefs idea in a sort of concise and intuitive way, I say that the luxury belief class, they walk the 50s and talk the 60s.

Mr. Jekielek:

They walk the 50s and talk the 60s. 

Mr. Henderson:

They walk the 50s and talk the 60s, meaning they live their lives as if they are 1950s Republicans in the white picket fence, love God and country, work hard, go to college, go to work, pay your taxes, do the right thing. Personally, that’s how they live their life. But then if you ask them about their opinions on various important sociocultural topics, it’s either kind of a laissez-faire, you know, you can do what you like, a practiced indifference. Or it’s often the opposite of the way they live their life, like, yes, I got married, I did this, I did that, but you shouldn’t have to do this, and we need to find a way to dismantle this structure. 

So you’ll see this with people who were raised wealthy, but then they say, tax the rich. Or they are married personally, but then they say, we need to dismantle marriage. They personally never use drugs, or if they do, they do it in a very careful way. But publicly, it’s, let’s decriminalize everything and let people do whatever they want. That’s the idea.

There was a book a few years ago called The Meritocracy Trap by the Yale Law professor, Daniel Markovits. And in this book, he uses this unforgettable phrase. He uses this phrase: non-practicing libertines. That’s how he describes the new elite, non-practicing libertines. And what does he mean by this? He means they are libertines outwardly. Again, you know, if you want to live in a polycule and use drugs and, you know, sort of indulge in your hedonistic impulses. That’s perfectly fine, but they’re non-practicing, meaning personally they live the opposite of that. They’re very careful and rigid and kind of conservative in their own personal lives. 

So what I would like is for the luxury belief class, you know, this segment of our elites who spread these ideas, to essentially preach what they practice. You know, if you’re going to live like a conservative, maybe you should also sort of share those steps that fueled your own success. And that was one of the things that shocked me the most. The people that I encountered in college, grad school, and now, you know, graduates of these institutions, they denigrate the very values that fueled their own success.

Mr. Jekielek:

There are a few ways you could think about what’s happening, right? One way is that, I don’t know, to use a term from this conference—we’re here at ARC [Alliance for Responsible Citizenship]—the deconstructionists, they somehow captured the minds of the elites with these ideas. And so they’re performatively being expressed, purely performatively, even though that’s not the culture within the families themselves. Another way you could view it is that these people are actually intentionally promoting things that are destructive so that they can maintain their high-level social status. Where do you think this lands?

Mr. Henderson:

It’s a good question, this idea of intent. Do the people who espouse luxury beliefs—are they malicious? Are they intentionally trying to erode the values that lead to success? My sense is that most of the people who express luxury beliefs are sincere. They really do believe that defunding the police would somehow lead to less suffering. They have been convinced somehow. 

I would say there are about maybe 20 percent of the people who espouse these beliefs who are very cynical and duplicitous. They intentionally express these views in order to acquire social status or clout, in the same way that many people will buy expensive material possessions not because they like the possession, but because they know it’ll impress other people. Similarly, there are people who express luxury beliefs, not because they believe in that view, but because they know it’ll garner clout, it’ll garner status, so they express that belief. So the motivation for the luxury good and the luxury belief are often identical. 

But there are many people who convince themselves that the reason why they’re partaking in these activities is, you know, their motives are sincere. So if you ask the guy, he buys a Lamborghini and he says, look, it just makes me feel confident that I drive the Lamborghini; it makes me feel good. I like the car, that’s why I bought it. I’m not trying to impress anyone. That might be true, but I think a part of you also likes the fact that when people see you in that Lamborghini, they think of you in a certain way. 

It is the same with luxury beliefs. They espouse the belief, they’re sincere in it, but there’s a part of me that thinks somewhere deep down there’s also this sense of satisfaction you get from espousing the belief. Your peers, your social circles, similarly credentialed elites applaud you for it. And they say, what a compassionate and interesting and sophisticated person you are for holding that view.

Mr. Jekielek:

Do you remember when you first sort of made this connection of this concept, when this concept became something real in your mind?

Mr. Henderson:

Yes. I studied psychology, and my interests were, you know, eclectic. I was having a lot of conversations with students and graduates of elite universities. One of the first interactions I had that made this idea click for me: I was having a conversation with a fellow student at Yale, and she told me that we’ve got to move beyond marriage. 

I asked her, how were you raised? And she said, well, I was raised by two married parents. And then I said, you’re going to be a very successful person later on down the line. Do you plan to have a family? How are you thinking about your own future? And she said, I’m going to get married and have kids because that’s how I was raised, and that’s what I’m going to do for my kids. But I think as an ideal, we need to move beyond this. 

What I was hearing was, I benefited from this age-old institution that led me to study at Yale. I plan to carry this benefit forward for my own kids. But my official public stance is that people shouldn’t do this. So I heard this interesting mismatch. I started to read a lot about the sociology of class, from Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu. There was an interesting book just a few years ago called, WASPs: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy. WASP means White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. This was the American ruling class from roughly the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. I’m sure you’re aware of this, but just for the viewers.

Mr. Jekielek:

Sure, of course.

Mr. Henderson:

In this book, the author, Michael Knox Beran, you know, it’s basically a sort of history of the WASP class, the ruling elite of America. He points out that what he terms  the high WASPs, the tippy-top of the WASP elite structure, they would intentionally champion ideas and support certain causes because, and this is a quote, because of the secret knowledge that it would abhor the Bulgarians. In other words, they would support these views not because they believed in them necessarily, but because there was a certain glee and satisfaction at the fact that the masses wouldn’t like it. It was a way to achieve distinction. 

So if you are a normal, ordinary person and you think police are a good thing, how do I distinguish myself from you? How do I show that I’m a member of this rarefied class, a card-holding member of polite society? Well, I say, actually, we don’t need police. This whole idea of police is tawdry, it’s declassé, it’s lowly. And so this is a way to sort of elevate myself above the commoner by saying these things. 

Those kinds of ideas around class have this distinction, this pursuit of status, and you see sort of historical examples of this during the Middle Ages. Spices were extremely expensive. Initially, they were hard to obtain; only the elites could afford them. But then, during the Age of Exploration, European explorers started to travel to the Americas and to India. The cost of spice dropped dramatically, and suddenly, ordinary European peasants could afford spice. 

In response, a lot of the elites and aristocrats in Europe banned spice from their courts. Famously, King Louis XIV said no spice allowed except for desserts. And this was in the 15th and 16th centuries. And so you had this thing, it was only us elites who got it. Oh, the masses are using it now. Okay, so in response, no, we don’t want that anymore. It’s always trying to be different from the ordinary person. And luxury beliefs are the latest way that they do this. The difference here is that luxury beliefs are costly. In a way that, okay, they’re using spice, we’re not going to use it anymore. 

But if they believe in the police, we don’t. So let’s not allow them to have access to law enforcement. Or I have a lot of impulse control and the ability to plan ahead. I’m in a fortunate environment. So, you know, the possibility of drug use is very remote for me. But let’s flood those other areas with, if you want to order fentanyl on Amazon, that’s perfectly fine. Because who am I to judge? Who am I to say, you know, one choice is better than the other?

Mr. Jekielek:

I keep going back to this idea. And again, the theme of this conference is, well, reconstruction from the continuing deconstruction, right, of Western civilization. And I can’t help but wonder, it feels like some sort of ingenious ploy, if you will, to kind of convince the elites of society to get on a program which would, in effect, be deconstructionist. Because, well, of course, those elites always have a disproportionate impact on what really happens in society, right? So do you think this was a deliberate play by people who were into deconstruction to kind of inculcate this idea into the elites so that then it would sort of trickle through society?

Mr. Henderson:

Yes, it’s interesting. I think a lot of these ideas are conceived in elite universities. And many of the originators of these ideas, I think, yes, they do have this. The end in mind is something like a socialist utopia, some kind of toppling of capitalism, the structure as it exists. People are suffering from some Marxist notion of false consciousness, and we need to wake people up. And so I’m going to spread these ideas. Anything that is potentially at odds with conventional Western norms or values must inherently be good. So the propagators may have some of that malicious intent. But I think as it spreads throughout elite media and then through kind of the rest of the upper and upper-middle class, most people are somehow persuaded that, well, it’s got to be a good idea.

Mr. Jekielek:

But otherwise, you couldn’t. I mean, most people are actually well-intentioned. So there would be no way for it to spread unless—I mean, that’s what I—that’s why I think it strikes me as sort of ingenious.

Mr. Henderson:

Yes. It is brilliant because they frame it in a way that captures people’s desire to feel moral, and it captures the kind of uniquely elite desire to feel special, to achieve distinction. So, of course, you’re a compassionate person if you believe these ideas, but also you’re going to be unique and different, and you’re going to sound sophisticated and interesting. You’re going to come up with the sort of intellectual acrobatics necessary to arrive at this idea that is at odds with what the majority of society believes. But there’s always this kind of implicit snobbish attitude that maybe the masses don’t know what’s good for them anyway. And it’s us fine people who went through these institutions that know better.

Mr. Jekielek:

Many people have made the argument recently that sometime this year or last year, we’ve kind of hit an inflection point. Some people call it peak woke, right? And there’s just a drawback. And a lot of institutions that were kind of caught up in this are starting to pull back from these policies that would, you know, basically codify, enact a lot of the luxury beliefs that we’ve just been discussing. What do you think? Have we reached peak woke? 

Mr. Henderson:

Yes. In sort of a broad sense, I think we have. Things are obviously not as bad as they were in 2020 or 2021. Still, there are certain parts of society where it’s as bad as ever. I think academia is as woke in 2026 as it was in 2021. But for elite media and for, I think, sort of the professional managerial class overall, things have gotten a little better. 

We went through a very sort of strange and intense period there in the early 2020s, of the far-Left capturing the institutions, and they saw their moment to push forward. And maybe they saw that there was a little bit too much overreach, and there was a backlash with the election of Trump, for example, in 2024. And now I think there’s a sort of a period of self-reflection. But I don’t think woke is permanently going away. It’s in a kind of hibernation mode. 

This is something I think people misunderstand: in 2020, many activists were digging up social media posts from 2009 and saying, oh, we’re going to retroactively apply progressive moral standards today to something you posted a decade ago. Today, people think, okay, we’ve passed peak woke. I’m going to say what I want, speak my mind. 

But they’re unaware, many of them. Just to throw a number out there, say 2033, maybe woke is going to come back. They’re going to find your post from 2026 and say, we’re in power again. We’re in Woke 2.0 or 3.0, and you posted something on X or on Facebook from six or seven years ago, and now is the time for us to reemerge and reenact our preferred policies. So I think it’s just a sort of a lull in the woke far-Left movement. 

Mr. Jekielek:

That doesn’t bode well for the future. I mean, again, if you accept the premise of this conference, that doesn’t bode well for the future of Western civilization. I mean, not to be overly melodramatic here, but, yes.

Mr. Henderson:

I know. Look, I’m broadly, temperamentally, I suppose, aligned with conservatives. But I think a lot of them are incompetent, and they sort of fumble and mismanage the power whenever they manage to acquire it. They manage to—what is the line? They seize defeat from the jaws of victory. There’s still a chance. We’ll see how things go with the midterms of 2028 with how the universities continue to interact with the Republican administration. There are some signs of reform. 

But look, that energy from 2020, it didn’t go away. It’s, you know, that will sort of return. And then how do we handle it the next time? Because in 2020, you know, all the institutions folded. You even saw conservatives sort of falling in line with the whole BLM [Black Lives Matter], Antifa, all that kind of stuff. At the very least, paying lip service to it. The next time that energy arises, will it be different?

Mr. Jekielek:

Could you give me some examples of this? What is it—seizing defeat from the jaws of victory? Give me some examples of what you mean when you say that. 

Mr. Henderson:

There are examples at elite universities where, you know, I understand like, you know, with people like Trump, with J.D. Vance, and with many other members of the administration, concerning these elite universities and removing funding. Often, when you hit them in their pocketbooks, that’s when you can start to persuade them. But I think they may have overshot the mark by reducing funding for science, for example. Not fake social science, but actual hard STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics] sciences, in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and medical technology. 

I think that went a little bit too far. Even a lot of people who may have otherwise been allies or have been broadly aligned within the academy, when they saw the administration start to strip funding from sectors that had nothing to do with wokeness, that ended up backfiring, and they lost a lot of people that would have otherwise been on their side.

Mr. Jekielek:

I see, interesting. So, it’s not not going far enough, it’s going too far in most cases.

Mr. Henderson:

Is that going too far? I think it was just a very unstrategic move. It was a blunder, unnecessary. I don’t even know if I would say going too far. But I suppose there is a case to be made that, you know, making mistakes like that, it’s better than the opposite, which would be doing nothing. So, you know, I’ve heard versions of that argument, too.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m curious if you have some thoughts. You gave a list earlier of these different luxury beliefs. Do you have a sense of which one you think is the most damaging or that needs to be challenged first?

Mr. Henderson: 

Oh, man, there’s a lot. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Or a few, or a handful.

Mr. Henderson:

If I had to choose one, I think a lot of the difficulties that we see would be around the family. You know, this idea that either all family structures are equally likely to allow children to succeed and flourish, or the belief that we need to actively dismantle the very family structure that is most likely to lead to success, which is two married parents. And so if we can fix that one, we may sort of indirectly start to repair some of the others. 

Because when you have kids that are in environments full of neglect and an absence of role models and aspirations and goals, you know, the behavioral gap between people who are at the top and the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum—the gap in terms of marriage rates, law-abidingness, punctuality, employment rates, all of these kinds of things—they used to be very small, and they started to diverge in the early 1960s. And what could be responsible for this? 

Because in 1960, there were poor people, too. This can’t be the result of economic factors alone. If you compare poor people in 1960 to poor people in 2026, their lives look very different in terms of, again, employment rates, law-abidingness, crime, likelihood of getting married and staying married versus remaining single or divorced, and incarceration, drug addiction. And much of that starts in the home, with the family, with stable communities. But the framework around luxury beliefs is important, which is: The people who are successful in their lives, I think they need to be more honest about the practices that led to that success. And that’s the meta-idea of luxury beliefs.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s right. You’ve written about status anxiety in that vein, right? And just how the realities of modern culture amplify that. Tell me a bit about that.

Mr. Henderson:

Yes. Well, status anxiety, it’s an interesting idea. So people ask, what is social status? And a simple way to think about it is respect and admiration from your peers, the people whose opinion you care about. Do you feel admired by them? Do you feel respected by them? And there have been some interesting findings in social psychology which have indicated that that type of status—do I feel respected and admired by my peers—is a stronger predictor of happiness than socioeconomic status, how much money or how educated you are. 

There’s a moderate to small to moderate correlation between income and happiness, but a stronger effect of admiration and respect. That’s what I mean by status. And people have varying degrees of desire for this kind of status. I sometimes compare it to hunger. You know, hunger is a universal thing that we all feel, but some of us experience it more frequently and more intensely than others, this desire for food.

Now, we see this also for status. It’s a human universal. We all want to be liked and admired to some degree, but some of us feel it more frequently and more intensely than others. And there’s a question here: Who experiences this anxiety, this longing for status the most? Well, maybe counterintuitively, the findings are that the people at or near the top of the socioeconomic ladder experience the most desire for status. So the people who already have it want it even more.

There have been a couple of different studies. This is a replicated finding. When you ask people, you know, first collecting their objective metrics of status, so, you know, income, occupational prestige, level of education, how well you’re doing in your life. People who are at or near the top of those measures are the most likely to agree with statements like, it would please me to be in a position of power over others. I enjoy when people look at me when I walk into a room, it’s important for me to have influence over my peers. You think, well, who has this sort of insatiable desire? It’s people who are kind of already doing quite well. 

There’s a sociologist, Émile Durkheim, from the 19th century, and he had this classic line, the more one has, the more one wants, since satisfaction received only stimulates instead of filling needs. One way to think about this is if you are dispossessed, impoverished, you know, you are materially deprived in some way, you have a very limited number of desires. Maybe you want shelter, you want warmth, you want food—you know, these very basic desires, a limited number. But once all of those needs are met, you know, now what do you want? Well, you want respect, you want esteem, you want admiration, you want approval. And that feeling is much stronger once all of your other needs are already met.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, being here at ARC, it’s very interesting because I go to a number of different conferences that are broadly interested in this topic, right? Even with The Epoch Times, our tagline is truth, tradition, hope, right? It’s there in your shot on camera, in fact. And what strikes me with this conference at ARC—I want to talk about it a little here—is that it feels to me like, you know, an audience that views itself as somewhat sophisticated or a group that views itself as somewhat sophisticated, which isn’t necessarily the case in most of the other conferences that I’m going to, which are more kind of like a people’s thing, right? I’m curious what you think. 

Mr. Henderson:

Yes. I love ARC and I’ve been to every single one. I think that these conferences are necessary.

Mr. Jekielek:

I feel at home here. I mean, I love the emphasis on classical music and art. I mean, it’s really been a joy to be here.

Mr. Henderson:

Oh, yes. It’s edifying; a place where they have managed to collect a group of ambitious, smart, interesting people who can sense that something is going wrong in the culture. And even if everyone here doesn’t agree on everything, they do agree that, you know, there’s room for repair, for reform, for finding ways to help society flourish. And these are necessary sort of events to bring these kinds of people together. I, you know, begrudgingly become accepting, I suppose, of this idea that if you want to understand class conflict and this kind of thing, it’s often framed as, it’s the rich vs. the poor, it’s the workers versus the capitalists, it’s the one percent and the 99 percent.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s the communist framing, isn’t it?

Mr. Henderson:

It’s often framed in the Marxist framework. But if you look historically at how societies actually change and who drives this change, there’s the existing regime of the existing elites. and they are deposed by a counter-elite or an aspirational elite. So this is Peter Turchin’s idea. He’s discussed this at length: intra-elite conflict, intra-elite competition. And essentially, you know, so much of the battles in society are waged between sort of two groups of people who have economic capital, cultural capital, a vision for society. And of course, they often require support, and they’re bolstered by support from the masses, from many people. 

But ultimately, you need sort of a group of unified, intelligent, competent, capable people who sort of have connections into different nodes in society in order to drive change. And this is another shortcoming I think that conservatives have. Leftists are extremely good at that kind of ground game of the long march through the institutions and that idea of playing the long game of infiltrating K-12, higher education, the professions, and human resources. And conservatives have repeatedly dropped the ball on this. 

There’s this classic line: the side that wants to win is always going to triumph over the side that wants to be left alone. And conservatives, you know, they want to be left alone. It’s understandable. You want small government. You want to be left to your own devices. But as long as there’s a powerful faction out there that wants to interfere with you, to just hang out at your house and grill and be left alone is not really feasible. There’s got to be a counter-elite to shield you from those other kinds of elites.

Mr. Jekielek:

So I went to this American dinner last night, and of course we were talking about the American Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence, and it just strikes me, in the vein of what you just said, that those people, the Founding Fathers and the people that participated, were people who both wanted to be left alone and to win.

Mr. Henderson:

Yes, that’s a good point. Yes, I mean, with the American Revolution, I mean, this is a perfect example of this, of, you know, the American Revolution. You know, it’s often repeated as, you know, sort of ordinary settlers or people in the American colonies, and they’re fighting against this, you know, aristocratic British elite. But the Founding Fathers themselves were, you know, very aristocratic, erudite, educated men who themselves were, you know, financially for their time, very well off. 

Obviously, we won’t know the specific statistics for this, but I’ve read that historians say something like only a third of the people in the American colonies actually supported the American Revolution. Very few ordinary people wanted to wage this war, and yet the Founding Fathers—they saw their opportunity, they saw their opening. They coalesced, they united, they gave this sort of shared ambition and managed to triumph in this case. And I think that is kind of a model of how these things actually tend to go: that historically, ordinary people are either uninvolved or sort of tepidly interested. But then the elite, sort of, and counter-elite, sort of spotlight and foreground certain issues and get them to care about it.

Mr. Jekielek:

We talked about peak woke, and you say you think it’s just kind of simmering and waiting to roar back. So I’ll ask the question maybe in a slightly different way, with like luxury beliefs now, right? Are they here to stay with our elite classes, or is this something you see a way to kind of, or at least reduce them? I mean, maybe by people like this, because clearly there are a lot of elites who have a different view of the world here. 

Mr. Henderson:

Well, I liken the idea of luxury beliefs to fashion. And so there’s this cyclical nature of what’s fashionable and trendy today. You know, a year from now, two years from now, it’ll be out of date. It won’t be trendy anymore. 

Mr. Jekielek:

It feels awfully fickle.

Mr. Henderson:

Yes. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, these have profound impacts on our society, on our socioeconomic status of people, the most vulnerable people, right? I mean, this is what probably got you thinking about this stuff in the first place, right?

Mr. Henderson:

Yes. I think maybe the specific beliefs will shift over time, but the underlying drive for status, for distinction, that will remain, and it will continue to express itself in the form of luxury beliefs. So look, I started writing about this publicly in 2019, in September, the first essay I published on the idea of luxury beliefs. And I was asked at that time, what’s the next luxury belief? And I said, you know, I have no idea. I think I probably tossed out a couple of ideas that never came to fruition, not good at predicting the future. 

But the very last thing I think I would have ever predicted was, oh, in six or seven months, you’re going to see the cultural elite coalesce around this idea that we need to abolish the police. That would have never occurred to me. And then six months later, it’s in the headlines in The New York Times. Yes, we literally mean abolish the police. And you’re seeing people in the streets marching in favor of it. And then there were many cities that did reduce funding for law enforcement and led to a temporary increase in violent crime.

Now, a lot of people are embarrassed by that whole thing. If you bring up defund the police with a lot of Left-leaning people, they start to get a little uncomfortable and say, well, we didn’t really mean that, because now it’s unfashionable, and we’re going to move on to the next thing. No one will be held accountable for it. That’s the tragic thing about this.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, never any accountability for luxury beliefs being enacted with disastrous consequences.

Mr. Henderson:

I mean, was anyone held accountable for the lockdowns? You know, like, did anyone? 

Mr. Jekielek:

But we’re still holding on to some hope here, you know?

Mr. Henderson:

I hope there will be. But, you know, I wouldn’t bet on it. You know, once in a while there is.  

Mr. Jekielek:

But we need that, don’t we? This whole thing, where again, right, everything we’re all about sort of re-knitting the fabric of society, somehow that’s being deconstructed. Don’t we need accountability to get that? 

Mr. Henderson:

Yes, to an extent, I think there’s also something to be said for it. Accountability is pointing out mistakes of others, and then there’s the other piece, which is creating a positive, aspirational vision and focusing more on, okay, all of these things happened, a lot of disappointments, a lot of elite failure, but let’s move on and move forward with a different path. And in order to persuade people of that path, just to kind of point out, oh, by the way, remember all those failures and how no one was accountable? So you can use that, too, as a sort of fuel for your movement.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. A final thought as we finish?

Mr. Henderson:

I’ve really enjoyed this as well, so thank you. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Rob Henderson, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.