I think the author misses the point that often those poorer people who are victimized by criminals are then ignored or even endangered by the police response. Police budgets keep increasing and outcomes including percentage of solved crimes keep declining. A good portion of that money could be much better spent on eradicating poverty, treating drug addictions instead of incarcerating users, keeping people in schools, keeping parents in homes, and having mental health resources for people before they are beyond help.
Plus, good apples in the police force end up drummed out or worse. If you try and blow the whistle you might end up involuntarily committed and your buddies on the force will make challenge coins commemorating it.
The author is trying to declare this perspective as elitist rather than address it head on.
It's a pretty common political trick to reframe populist views as elitist and vice versa. It allows you to either promote or attack a "dangerous" idea/candidate without having to actually engage with it.
As for why people espouse them, I grew up in the stereotypical working class family of four. Two parents who weren't always happily married, one sister, and me in an 890 square foot 3 bed, two bath on a tiny lot. It was the largely Black and Hispanic part of a mostly white town with factories and tourist attractions. My dad never graduated college, and my sister did before my mom enrolled.
Let me tell you, the police never did a thing for me but harass me. I was sexually assaulted as a young boy, but of course nobody at the police department would take a child's word over a teenager's. I was stopped in front of my home one night by six cruisers, one officer with a shotgun out, because an off-duty officer saw me swerve within a lane to miss a couple of potholes half an hour earlier. My sister's book of checks were stolen out of our mailbox, and the police found out who did it. My sister was away at university and had her account frozen. She had to beg and borrow money until it all got fixed. But the police refused to release the identity of the thief for a civil suit because "the bank is the only victim". My car was damaged on the high school lot, but the police wouldn't even take a report because the school district should handle it. The school district refused to release the information for the other damaged car because "that would be a violation of a student's privacy". In another town in another state I had a motorcycle stolen. I raised hell with the police and DA's office. It was finally recovered, but they decided not to arrest or prosecute the thief because he returned it. He returned it with about $1200 worth of damage to a $900 street legal, licensed bike. When I went to the DA's office in person to complain, two ADAs had a conversation in front of the waiting room about "that guy with the motorcycle" who "probably let his dealer borrow it and was slow to get it back".
I had plenty of friends coerced into residential rehab for minor drug usage because it was a criminal offense. So rather than going on with their lives or getting some outpatient counseling, they lost their jobs and often their homes. I have a friend who lost a lucrative job with a huge multinational company because he had a breakdown related to his bipolar disorder while at work. He ended up couch surfing a while between jobs until he found another one.
So, yeah, call me elitist. I think money could be better spent actually helping people who need it than sneering at them and threatening them when they're already the victims.
> And what seems to happen is that affluent people often broadcast how they owe their success to luck. But then they tell their own children about the importance of hard work and individual effort.
I don't find any of this stuff is true. If I had a dime for every time some less unsuccessful person say that the affluent are just lucky to have been born into the right environment, or that such and such successful company or person just had a "lucky break", I would be rich.
The rich telling people that their owe their success to luck could just be practiced modesty, because if someone wealthy and successful goes around communicating the idea that it was all gained through individual hard work and effort, without any element of being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people and other effects, then that would be perceived as arrogance.
You're just not supposed to attribute all your successes to yourself. That's why when stars accept an award, a lot of the acceptance speech is usually about thanking everyone who helped them get there.
Luxury Beliefs aren't status symbols because talk is cheap; anyone can parrot what he or she heard from an affluent person.
> You're just not supposed to attribute all your successes to yourself.
Because it's very rarely true. Yes perhaps the individual performance of an actor is their own, but how much of the overall performance could be attributed them realistically?
People pick up on conceit and sanctimony pretty easily.
The writer here makes an error in assuming that what he terms "luxury beliefs" are invented by people with more money or influence. Ideas like police abolition absolutely have their roots in working class movements in places like the South Side of Chicago and the Bronx.
I think a more interesting analysis would have compared people whose lives are at stake in political fights vs. those who are well-off enough that they can participate as a sort of hobby (or, yes, as a way of accumulating cultural capital). For the latter group, their beliefs and their ability to participate in political debates are indeed a luxury. But I don't think this divide would mirror the US culture war as closely as the author seems to think it would.
> They can afford to hold this position, because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security.
I think this represents a fundamental difference in how people perceive "safety" and where it comes from. The author seems to suggest that wealthy individuals feel safe because they have access to additional security measures such as gates or private guards. I've seen this quite commonly in some parts of the world, but my experience in the US is quite the opposite: wealthy communities are so segregated from poverty and, subsequently, crime, that they don't feel the need to put up defenses.
Yeah, personally I'd say that seeing private security often makes me feel significantly less safe. Not because I'm afraid of being targeted by them, but because their presence suggests that there's some need for them. The actually safe places have decorative gates, not gates intended to keep anyone out.
Oh no, this isn't the "virtue signaling" argument again, is it? I like to call this the Joker Argument: "Underneath you're no different than me, Batman!". It's a great argument because you can use it in any situation against any opponent, because it is contentless. And the effect is to attack your opponent's character and claim that they don't really mean what they are saying, which justifies your own selfish motivations while trying to paint the other person as a hypocrite. But it's just another ad hominem attack. And it's obviously false too: you can't know what another person's motivations are, and to say that you do is putting words in someone else's mouth. In that sense it's a form of straw man attack too as you are setting up an imaginary version of the other person to knock down. If you are using an argument like this, it's a clear sign that you don't have any real argument left to make. It's an act of desperation.
Let's not do this, folks.
2. Police departments have a problem with race but the problem can be fixed by reforming the current system
3. Police reform hasn't worked. We need to defund police and reinvent our approach to public safety.
I don't like the branding of "defund the police" but I'd still choose 3.
Not because I live in an elite gated community and can afford to collapse society just to show off, but because of the three options it's the closest to my beliefs.
Sending untrained people with guns to deal with mental health and or drug addictions is just stupid.
I hate multiple choice polls whose options aren't exhaustive.
I'm closer to #2... police departments have problems, but the system can be reformed. But I don't think it's particularly a race issue, and wouldn't want to pick an option casting it as such.
Ten years ago, i was basically a social worker, and had a friend who happened to be a native peruvian (not a latino at all, so black-skinned, but clearly south american chin and overall face), adopted by upper middle-class parents.
When he was young, he had no accent, had a curb chain and a small cross, a weird (but tame) haircut, and old/tight clothes (you know, christian private school type).
He then started to listen to rock and rap music, wore hoodies and jeans, and shaved his head. Basic adolescent stuff. His encounters with the police increased tremendously at that time, and also weirdly never managed to hitchhike (he lived in a relatively small city, but still a city. Maybe he never tried). At least according to him. Three years later, he understood, and started to dress himself better: tight T-shirts, non-baggy jeans, nice, professionnal haircut, and put his curb chain back (that's when i met him). He had not been interrogated or asked an ID for several years after.
I still think the skin color matters for law enforcment btw, but i'm pretty sure this is a class issue.
>Sending untrained people with guns to deal with mental health and or drug addictions is just stupid.
Cops are untrained, but a larger budget would help them train (and hire enough people). I haven't been to San Francisco, but everyone here loves to complain about how it's gone to shit essentially because cops don't enforce any of these things.
Is this accurate? Sounds like more cops would help, rather than less.
The 'luxury belief' here is that one's opponents all hold their views for reasons that they are either not aware of, or are deceptive about.
I was in Seattle for CHOP -- the "defund the police" crowd was literally a bunch of really hecking poor young people, pushed to the limit by the pandemic and the politics of the day.
That the Right immediately rewrites historical events *that it did not attend* as forms of luxury consumption is because that's the only way they can see the world.
> They can afford to hold this position, because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security.
Evaluating income alone is a very poor indicator of relative wealth. $100k in even a small city ain't exactly upper class living, and it certainly ain't usually enough for most people to "live in safe, often gated communities" or "hire private security". The failure to breakdown by income v. cost of living is a glaring issue with this analysis, as is not including further thresholds (say, $500k).
Another analytical failure here is the ignorance of the urban v. suburban v. town v. rural differences exhibited in the table the author included. Support for police defunding drops dramatically in rural areas, and those areas just so happen to be the ones with the least exposure to police brutality (v. urban and suburban populations experiencing it regularly).
There's also the low sample size, but that's relatively minor of an issue compared to the above.
> They found that individuals with higher income or a higher social status were the most likely to say that success results from luck and connections rather than hard work, while low-income individuals were more likely to say success comes from hard work and individual effort.
Considering that (according to the article) the ones who believe that success comes from hard work and individual effort haven't found that success, while the ones who believe it results from luck and connections have found that success, that would rather strongly suggest that the latter assessment is correct. Duping the working class into believing they'll find success if they toil harder for their bosses is exactly how the ownership class maintains its control over the working class.
> When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative.”
Neither had rich people, because these terms didn't enter the public discourse (outside of academic circles and other niches) until recently. Nowadays, these terms are not so confined. Per the author's argument, these are no longer status symbols; they were 10 or 20 years ago, but today you can find plenty of wage workers who have at least a vague idea of what these terms mean and use them. You no longer need to be an academic to know that some people have genders and sexes that don't match up or that sometimes cultural traditions end up adopted in caricaturized forms.
Shouldn't this be less true in a world where we all have anonymous or pseudo-anonymous online personas? I don't need to virtue signal on HN or reddit, I upvote, downvote, and post according to what I actually feel.
This compared to 50 years ago where ostensibly if I advocated something controversial I would have to say it to others' face.
> 2. Replacement guilt/shame hitching a ride on the decline of Christian values
I don't know what this means. Are you suggesting all people have some inherent level of guilt and without Christianity it funnels into other beliefs?
> 3. Disassociation from reality, either due to physical distance (money) or mental distance (tech enabled social bubble)
1. No, because influence and decision making aren't evenly distributed between online/offline personas. Even if they were, it doesn't change human nature, (most) people need a sense of belonging, a group identity. If anything, virtue signalling appears to be amplified online for likes / follows / etc.
2. Centralized religion may be in decline across much of the world, but that doesn't mean all the ingrained beliefs and associated behaviors are linearly declining along with it. What I see are people adopting new systems of beliefs that replace their religious foundations while keeping many of the associated behaviors intact.
For example, a core aspect of most of the practices of Abrahamic religions is sin followed by guilt, shame, forgiveness and, sometimes, atonement. This process doesn't just disappear, it has inertia that often survives apostasy. I pointed out this process is open to ideological 'hijacking' and replacement by new ideologies which keep the process in place but alter the individual's conscious rationalization for that process's existence.
1. That’s what I’m saying. So-called “virtue signaling” appears strongest online, where it is least relevant, large pseudo-anonymous shout boxes like twitter and FB comments and news article comments. As you mention, most people need group identity. If I have group identity with leftists or whatever then of course I’m going to assert their values even on twitter where nobody is reading my tweets because I’m not famous. So it’s not virtue signaling to a nonexistent reader, it’s asserting a genuinely held belief (vis a vis their believed “membership” as a leftist).
By the virtue signaling thesis, you should see “signaling” most commonly in-person, over email, over text, etc. after all, if virtue signaling isn’t done with your identity, to others who know you, then it’s accomplishing nothing.
my lived experience is exactly the opposite of the virtue signaling thesis, with the exception of corporations (“pride” ads and such, marketing built to signal to popular sentiment)
2. Sorry I really have no idea. As a person in the younger generation without faith, I wasn’t raised going to church, so I can’t really relate. For me there is no “replaced” valued; faith was never present
Even if the larger idea of luxury beliefs is true, the choice of "defund the police" as one is really bizarre to me. No one benefits more from the existence of the police than those who would harbor these luxury beliefs.
Defund the Police actually means "reallocate much of the funding that goes into traditional police agencies into community services better suited/trained to diffuse/mitigate/prevent societal problems"
It's just the absolute worst branding possible for the movement.
I find it hard to take this seriously. The author mostly talks about the elite and the working class while ignoring the middle class.
In most wealthy countries, the educated middle class is about as large as the working class. There are often massive cultural differences between the groups. Many of the things the author attributes to the elite can also be attributed to the middle class. The same ideas the author found at elite institutions such as Yale and Cambridge are also prevalent in most middle-class universities.
I'm concerned that the author pulled himself up by his bootstraps from foster homes to military to Yale, but came to a conclusion which reinforces the socioeconomic circumstances of the very status quo that he overcame.
This idea that egalitarian beliefs are elite because working people don't have time to dabble in them is maybe one of the most damaging remnants of colonialism in America.
I lived that for several years at various labor jobs. Keep your head down and do your job or you'll get singled out. Somebody's gotta do it. Blame the elites spending our tax dollars (used to liberals, before that it was hippies, and commies before that).
Hopefully we get past this self-limiting style of thinking.
The truth is what sets us free. For example: working people thinking that hard work will lead to success is a tool that the wealthy use to keep people doing labor which isn't lucrative. People in crime-ridden neighborhoods know that the police won't come when they call them, that's why they want to defund the police and shift those funds to education and training to reduce the motivation for crime in the first place. Famous people endorsing ideas like Black Lives Matter isn't the same as a grassroots movement to root out systemic racism, although it helps.
I hesitate to even comment here because it creates a divisive atmosphere. But I can't sit idly by when these quippy and truthy opinion pieces are put forth as some kind of insightful revelation. But see, that was the point. The piece itself stirs feelings of division and gaslights the lower classes he's talking about which don't believe what he's writing.
How do we get to a higher understanding without constant vigilance? I honestly don't know. The US is working through some messy stuff right now. I think it begins with each person attempting to understand another's point of view. I would say empathy, but see, that word has been weaponized. We're losing the very vocabulary and civic engagement needed to heal the country.
Huh, I've only heard about luxury beliefs in the context of trans people. I'm sure the social cachet of blue hair and pronouns outweighs all the other stuff.
Speaking as a white, working-class kid who got a good education, worked hard, had some amazing luck, and is now an affluent, heteronormative, relatively high-status parent:
What a load of horseshit.
Yes, my wife and I teach our kids about the value of hard work, even as we recognize that there was a big element of luck and privilege involved in our success. It takes nothing away from our self-esteems to say that, even though, yes, we worked hard and continue to work hard. But we had some lucky breaks. And to be frank, I've screwed up a lot in my life and my career, and I've always been given another chance. Nobody ever said about me, "well, what did you expect? He's just a white heterosexual christian male, after all."
So is it a contradiction that we acknowledge our privilege and our good fortune, while teaching our children to work hard? Of course it isn't. Life is far more complicated than that, which this author, in his quest for a simple either/or framework and a pithy line, seems to forget.
There is also literally no one in our social circle, or anyone that I know of in our larger social media set, who advocates "defund the police." I would like to see police de-emphasize military-style equipment and training. I would like to see police trained to treat members of the public as citizens, rather than as enemy combatants. I would like to see fewer of them armed. I would like to see police officers who kill held accountable. I would like to see police cultivate better relationships with people of color. Are these "luxury beliefs"? I don't think so, but my beliefs are far too nuanced to be caricatured as "defund the police." Once again, though, the author needs something short and snappy, so that's what he's going with.
I read an interesting article blog post some time ago about "sanewashing" [1]
Sanewashing is the process by which radical policies get watered down - as a political movement becomes more mainstream, every new member wants to be able to explain the movement to their parents, and so chooses a slightly less radical, easier to understand interpretation. This happens over and over again until you reach the point where the watered down beliefs are the majority, and the movement finds people with the original radical beliefs are an embarrassment to be silenced.
"Defund The Police" isn't merely a confusing choice of name - the initial founders of the movement meant it literally, in the way an anarchist might. It's only as more people joined the movement that it's been sanewashed to mean "have more drug treatment, social workers and mental health crisis first responders, alongside the police"
I'd call it the motte-and-bailey fallacy. They really want the more radical version, but they pretend they mean the less radical version when people oppose them.
What do they mean? I’m guessing your answer is something like “reallocate police funds to other services”, but without your own explanation, this comment has little value other than signaling political belief.
> Largely people who get angry at the idea that black lives might matter.
This is an incredibly disappointing thing to read. Just because you disagree with another on some policy or political notion or another does not justify the belief that they hold a differing view for the most despicable reason you can come up with. Does that make sense?
Rob, you seem to be about 30. Maybe slow down and consider that you don't know everything yet. Having servants is purely a status symbol? Just because Veblen said it doesn't make it true. The rich of his era owned palatial estates with hundreds of rooms and acres of topiary. How the hell were they supposed to maintain all this property without servants? A mansion needs a staff, and those staff are servants of the owner.
They clearly don't need the actual mansions, but calling the servants themselves nothing but a status symbol is a stretch. Heck, I employ a maid today. Do you know how many people know that? Zero, including the people reading this comment, because none of you know who I am. How can this be signaling if there are zero people being signaled to? How about I already work a full-time job, have ten screws in my spine, and got tired of constantly cleaning my own house, so hired someone else to do it?
The graphic you get to at the bottom about defunding the police doesn't even truly support your claim. The top income group supports at a 32% rate. The bottom income group supports at a 22% rate. That isn't some massive discrepancy. Support for this position is clearly not only coming from people living in gated communities with private security.
Enough with the arm chair psychoanalysis. Why does every somewhat smart person on the Internet think they know the true inner desires of every other person on the planet that they hide from themselves? I would imagine support for the variety of policy positions represented by the slogan "defund the police" comes from quite a large number of different reasons. Saying the only reason anyone holds this belief is as a status symbol is nonsense. At best, it's a symbol of allegiance to popular-on-the-Internet leftist beliefs. That may be a "status" of a sort, but it isn't an indication that you're a Yale legacy. Indeed, it can't be, as your own graphic is showing it is not a majority belief for any income segment at all. Why would you solidify your belonging to a group by holding a belief that most of that group doesn't agree with?
A reasonable case but far overstated and undernuanced.
It’s true that there are plenty of ultra-wealthy people with Black Lives Matter signs on their yard and post hashtag-defund-the-police. But there are also public defenders from non-privileged backgrounds and social workers who argue the same thing and often more forcefully. Police funding reform isn’t something that was invented by white elites. It’s borrowed from activist communities. I’m sure for some it’s a way to indicate their more aesthetic opposition to the law-and-order authoritarian movements in the US today. But police reform is a broad-based movement even if it’s coming from the most educated segments of privileged and less-privileged people. (Personally, I suspect in 20 years everyone will claim to have been for it.)
We should also note that there are also zillionaires who are actively defunding the welfare state. Would the author agree this is a costly display, to declare you’re wholly self-made and spend real effort kicking away supports that many people need to survive? Or is just liberals who engage in ideological peacock feathers?
