Blame Elites...or the Masses? | Rob Henderson, Zach Goldberg, & Richard Hanania
Blame Elites...or the Masses? | Rob Henderson, Zach Goldberg, & Richard Hanania
Rob Henderson recently received his PhD in psychology at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Zach Goldberg is a former research fellow at CSPI and currently affiliated with the Manhattan Institute. They both join the podcast to talk about Rob’s idea of “luxury beliefs” and Zach’s new paper testing the theory in the context of attitudes towards criminal justice policy. Richard wonders about the extent to which one can say any individual actually suffers the consequences of their political beliefs, since the views of one person rarely change a policy outcome.
Later on in the conversation, Richard asks whether the luxury beliefs idea absolves inner city communities of their own shortcomings and serves as a way to put the blame on mostly white elites. Zach and Rob point to polls showing that blacks are more supportive than white liberals of spending money on police, which leads to a discussion of whether we can interpret such data in a different way and would be better served by putting more stock in factors such as how much communities cooperate with law enforcement, how they vote, and the kinds of politicians they support. The host and two guests also debate the extent to which liberal elites have actually pushed harmful ideas onto the masses, and if influential figures could change attitudes and behavior if they actually tried.
Listen in podcast form or watch on YouTube.
Links:
Blame Elites...or the Masses? | Rob Henderson, Zach Goldberg, & Richard Hanania
My question for the group: how does the idea of luxury beliefs relate to Bryan Caplan’s arguments against the self-interested voter hypothesis? It seems to me that if voters are fairly altruistic as appears to be the case (young people vote for senior benefits, old people vote to fund education, non-farmers support farm subsidies) that elites who vote to de-police must on some level actually believe that the policy they vote for will be good for people other than just elites.
To me this idea seems complementary to the luxury beliefs theory in some ways and in other ways not. No one is directly “suffering for their beliefs” when they vote as Hanania points out, but elites do arrive at beliefs that in aggregate cause damage to the poor because they’re insulated from any direct experience with the consequences of those attitudes. On the other hand, the implication of luxury beliefs sometimes seems to be that elites are uniquely selfish in choosing beliefs that benefit themselves and hurt others. Based on Bryan’s arguments, this seems wrong—all voters are fairly altruistic and when an elite believes differently from their elite peers it’s not because they are less selfish, usually it’s that they, like Rob, have different direct experiences that lead them to different conclusions about what’s good for society.
This is missing the point perhaps, and it's not relevant to how you vote in the privacy of the election booth, but having political beliefs outside the range of acceptability for your social group can have drastic consequences in the form of ostracization. This is more true for conservatives than for liberals, both because of cons being more generally accepting and lib milieus often having more economic, sexual (though not reproductive,) and intellectual opportunities. All of this is biased by me being a con who has only lived in lib cities and being exclusively attracted to women who are coded lib.