"Defund the police" or "healthy at every size" or "marriage is just an oppressive institution of the patriarchy" - these are just a few of the ideas that are becoming common doctrine among American elites. And Rob Henderson has described these new orthodoxies as “Luxury Beliefs.”
He says, much like second homes on the beach or Bentleys, luxury beliefs are thoughts that can only be afforded by people whose wealth shields them from the very harm those beliefs can cause to the rest of us. Henderson, a graduate of Yale and a PhD student at Cambridge, should have been susceptible to the very ideas he now criticizes. But the reason he remained immune to the groupthink of academia is because he was, in many ways, an outsider looking in. He grew up in a kind of chaos and suffering that most people shouting about white privilege and the evils of the musical Hamilton could never understand. And that’s why he is able to so accurately observe the indulgence and hypocrisy of our elite class, and call it out for what it is: a luxury.