It is interesting that Rob Henderson’s idea of “luxury beliefs” has made it to the Tory conference, presumably though the NatCon network. I saw various people spluttering and expostulating as to what they might be: the short form, in an English context, is “anything believed by Guardian readers and no one else”.
I don’t think the term is complete bullshit. For one thing, it is an iron law of British politics that the Guardian represents a permanent minority, and you can’t win elections by appealing to its sensibilities. See the liberal democrat moment of 2010 for the most spectacular of these misjudgements. So it’s understandable that a doomed and desperately flailing party should hope it could win an election by campaigning against the Guardian. It worked with Brexit, after all.
But “luxury beliefs” originated in an American context, when Rob Henderson, a boy from the underclass. came out of the army and into Yale, and found himself surrounded by rich people who professed crazy beliefs, such as “Defund the Police”, or wanted open borders.
Henderson's argument is that if anyone poor or powerless believed such guff they would suffer for it. So to profess them is not just tribal: they demonstrate a real status. You can only afford them if you are rich and privileged. Thus to hold them without conscious hypocrisy is a signal of privilege and high status that simply can’t be faked.
I think he’s right far as he goes, but that’s not far enough. Luxury beliefs do exist and they work as indicators of status as well as tribal markers. But the flaw in the Henderson theory is the assumption that the lower classes have no tribal markers that indicate their status either.1
Some forms of conspiracy theory work very well to illustrate this. To be able to believe idiotic things about the powerful is a mark of powerlessness, just as much as Defund the Police is a sign that you grew up in a gated community. No one who actually had to deal with Wall St could suppose it was all a Jewish conspiracy. “But her emails” is a sign that you have never actually held any powerful job in a bureaucracy and never will.
The association of luxury beliefs with the Left makes sense historically, in that the idea emerged from Henderson’s discomfort with his Yale classmates. But if a luxury belief is defined as one which you hold only because it will never be applied to you, the Right wing has more than its fair share — all the way from “Qu'ils mangent de brioche” to “Welfare reform”.
You might also want to doubt his claim that all the material marks of status (the Veblen goods) of the elite are now available to everyone in the light of the online examination of the wardrobes of Succession characters.
True story--I can't find the link but I bet you can google it up. There was a Silicon Valley adjacent county in California that had had, for years, an abysmally low vaccination rate because by California Law parents can obtain exemptions from schools' vaxx requirements on PHILOSOPHICAL grounds. And, of course, the clean-eating crunchy granola smarm-mammas all had philosophical objections. Until Covid hit and there was massive publicity on anti-vaxx activism amongst hoi polloi. Then the vaccination rate climbed to normal figures.
It's especially interesting when the status of a belief or practice flips for no apparent reason. For college graduation our senior class voted to forgo caps and gowns and give the money to start a scholarship fund for 'black people from the Chicago ghetto'. At the graduation ceremony several white boys wore dashikis, one white girl wore a sari, and quite a few students in ethnic costume of unknown provenance. If those pictures come to light, white students who'd worn dashikis and blond Afros could be permanently ejected from polite society for cultural appropriation.
And then there are water bottles. When bottled water became de rigeur clean-eating people would buy it by the case in 20 oz bottles, standing on a 3' x 3' cardboard tray covered with taut plastic wrap. They viewed those of us who drank tap water and used public fountains as declasse--and dirty. Then it dawned on them that they were dumping immeasurable plastic into landfills. Here there was a good reason for the flip. But there was no reason why they should have started buying cases of bottled watered in the first place.