> I figured out as soon as I saw the link title that the author's examples for "luxury beliefs" would just so happen to be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook.
Isn't the author's point that the examples correlate very highly with affluence? The fact that it may/may not be correlated to something else might be relevant, but I'm not seeing the relevance.
Yes, the examples correlate with affluence, which is a necessary condition for them to be included in this article; but it is obviously not a sufficient condition, as all "luxury beliefs" from elsewhere on the political spectrum are excluded.
My point is that this is a bad faith argument. The author pretends to care about "luxury" beliefs, but in truth, all he cares about is finding a cheap shot against feminist positions. He intends to delegitimize these positions by painting them as an upper-class fringe ("luxury") concern. Once this angle of attack is found, the author never stops to see that the same attack could be levied against any number of political positions that he himself might agree with, because he was never interested in a real debate to begin with: he only wants to smear and ridicule.
The point is not that the examples are also "correlated" with something else, it's that they're carefully cherry-picked and made a target for an attack that would work against conservative positions, carefully excluded by the author, just as nicely as it does against liberal positions here.
I dunno, I read it apolitically. Normal working-class people don’t give a shit about any of this stuff, and as soon as they do, it’ll become unfashionable, and we’ll move on to the next thing.
> dunno, I read it apolitically. Normal working-class people don’t give a shit about any of this stuff
The fiercest culture warriors I know are working-class folk. They do in fact, give a shit about this stuff, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. I blame the increased polarization.
The irony is that people who claim to be against culture wars - like the author - are they themselves actively engaging in a culture war while feigning neutrality. The truth is that they are simply against one perspective, which betrays either a lack of self-awareness, or bad faith.
I think once the idea of heteronormativity had percolated through all of society as a well understood concept, it would no longer be as pressing a concern. These concepts tend to be in vogue specifically because they are salient.
It is intellectually dangerous to read a piece like this "apolitically", precisely because a biased political agenda is wearing the garb of a much more universal observation. If the writer had mixed "luxury beliefs" from all over the political spectrum, then there would be a clear focus on what the title purports to concern. Instead, there is a second agenda that is being silently conflated without being acknowledged.
White working class people don’t, others definitely do. You can’t just generalize like that.
Working class people aren’t even inherently apolitical, they just don’t vote and aren’t taught that voting changes things like middle and upper class folks are
It's true that white working class people are the most likely to non engage politically for a variety of reasons, but it's also generalizing to say that working class PoC inherently care or adopt the same political ideas as the professional classes. Even among Black Southerners (who are very politically organized), whether someone agrees with modern social justice/intersectional frameworks is going to depend highly on other factors such as age and level of religiosity.
It’s wild that this whole piece is based on one response on one question in a poll.
The income bracket breakdown on that question is 22%/23%/32%. Which is significant but isn’t “they’re all top hat wearing elites just trying to impress each other”. “Defund the police” isn’t even the majority opinion of that income bracket.
This whole article is just an attempt to smear liberals. Even if you care about making the case that defund the police is a “luxury” to advance their social standing, then simply pointing to a slightly higher level of support in a higher income bracket is quite frankly stupid.
(As an aside, I don’t think they get the history of dueling right, either.)
The response proves his point too in a way, and something I've observed in my NYC left rich cohort.
Deflecting all criticism by knee jerk reaction of calling the questioner a racist. Disagreement over the magnitude of a problem, its relation to other problems, or the terms used for a problem makes you racist and therefore bad. Now we don't need to consider your opinion and can move on.
I did not call the author a racist, and to be quite honest, I fail to understand how one can reach that conclusion outside of a willful attempt to misrepresent my criticism.
> Is this so different? It's saying the thing without saying it.
This is reductive and only true in a binary world. If I question some anti-terrorism approaches, does that make me pro-terrorism? Of course not, but one could dishonestly accuse another of that to silence them or derail the conversation (see The Dixie Chicks). The world is hardly ever black and white.
My point was that their original comment about the article made was basically "I knew this person would be critical of blue coded luxury beliefs without being critical of red coded luxury beliefs!" without really arguing about the concept of luxury beliefs, or the examples being criticized.
It was shoot the messenger type stuff.
I recall when the Dixie Chicks criticized Dubya's invasion of Iraq.
The analogy here, to me, would be instead of arguing about whether Iraq invasion was a good idea, you said "aha! I knew the Dixie Chicks wouldn't have anything to say about Whitewater!" (or some similarly team blue scandal of similar vintage).
I hate tribalism, and I actually hate to see it even more on the side I vote with because it puts me in the position of being asked to defend things that I don't think make sense.
The latest topic of political discussion - Israel vs Palestine - is proving this. Not to derail the conversion about that topic itself, as it's highly contentious, but to point out that is a topic that is far from black and white, and both sides in our oversimplified two party system are finding out that there is nuance to be had on that topic, as they can't agree what the "right" stance is, though they can collectively agree that some ideas are stupid. To look at the other big topics of the past few, someone could be anti-mask and pro-vaccine, or anti-looting and vandalism but anti-police violence, neither of which wholly aligns with either party, but exists in the broader spectrum of what an individual believes in.
Yeah I think maybe we are making the same point in a way?
I felt the poster was discounting the article because the author had the opposite political preference on 2 topics. They lead with - "I figured out as soon as I saw the link title that the author's examples for "luxury beliefs" would just so happen to be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook."
To me reading the criticism of "my side" by reasonable writers from "the other side" is only additive. Also, logically that's exactly where I would expect the criticism to come from. You may even gain some perspective and re-evaluate your position or adjust your argument. This is how we grow.
As you point out, one can have a complex set of preferences/beliefs/things they support that do not fit directly into blue|red binary as a whole.
My problem with the argument is not that it's anti-feminist, it is that it's a broad-swath argument that could be levied against any number of beliefs, and the author deliberately chose to wield it only and exclusively against feminist and anti-racist positions.
I made that quite clear in my original comment by suggesting several conservative "luxury beliefs" that I believe the author would have to criticize on the same grounds, but failed to do so. This is not "deflection", it's showing that the article employs double standards and is thus intellectually dishonest.
The "predictable" part, in my estimation, is that this kind of argument would be used by a right-wing author. To be saying the thing by saying it, conservative cultural critics, when measuring liberal discourse, are incapable of coming up with a bar that they themselves don't trip over.
I think they do. It's just, it's so blatantly obvious that "single-payer healthcare is too expensive" and "there's no problem with police violence toward black people in particular" are "luxury beliefs" (in the sense that you can only afford to hold them if you're not directly affected by them) that there's no need to spell it out. (This point is sometimes spelled out when it comes to discussions on race and gender -- that's what "privilege" means. That "privilege" isn't brought up as much when it comes to economic/class issues speaks to the state of class warfare in the US.)
>Now we don't need to consider your opinion and can move on.
You can ignore anyone arguing from opinion, that's a given. "NYC left rich cohort" sounds like an absolute nightmare to try to figure out the truth with, given that they seem to think the character of a speaker has any bearing on the validity of their spoken words. Best not to engage with people like that, it's a waste of time.
Exactly, the deflections of 'racism' and 'sexism' are thought-terminating cliches bandied about in an act of pure class war. No need to listen to Trumpies talk about immigration and how it effects their community if they're all racists; that makes them the other and we can just pretend they don't exist.
I have genuinely never heard or read a Trump supporter discuss any practical effect of immigration, illegal or otherwise, on their actual communities. It's all very theoretical, based on hyperbolic and often false "news" items, and involves a heavy dose of borderline glee in being emotionally callous and selfish.
At beast, I have seen people misread statistics to support their position, but, again, that's not really "how it effects their community".
Okay, here's something written by Trump supporter and Cal State Fresno prof. Victor Davis Hanson discussing the effect of immigration on a community where he has lived since 1970:
That is a valuable perspective and all, and I don't discredit it (or concern for curbing illegal immigration as a top policy priority in general), but I'm not sure it's that persuasive for the point you are trying to make.
Let me put it this way: pointing to one cogent article by a non-representative Trump supporter (you won't find many of them in academia, and the college-educated skew liberal/Dem) doesn't really make me change my mind about writing most of them off as racists based on my personal experience and what most of them say (which is not as cogent and reasonable as this guy's article).
Couldn't your personal experience be a function of what Trump supporters make it through your filter bubble? We tend to see mostly the stupidest exemplars of our political opponents.
This article might be the single most vapid thing I've read all day, and I just read a Bari Weiss article for context.
Author leans in quite heavily to his own bonafides... somehow able to rise from foster homes to the military to graduate from Yale.
Neato.
And then he gets REALLY basic shit wrong.
"Working class" does not mean "lower middle class white folks." Go ask 10 "working class" black folks whether this country is racist. Then ask them whether it occurs at all levels of the country. They don't even need to know what the term "systemic racism" is to be able to describe it to you.
"Defund the police" had a pretty fucking specific meaning. It meant removing all the military surplus gear from police organizations in an attempt to reduce the amount of machismo and brutality from LEOs. Nobody should ever feel safe around a person who barely graduated from high school and yet has the authority to brutalize you and legally steal your shit. Go ask people if they think body cams on cops are important.
Is it now a "luxury belief" for women to be afraid that they live in a state that might attempt to jail them for the crime of having a failed pregnancy, or is that an actual valid concern? Don't want to do that? Okay, then let's look at the number of OBGYNs who are choosing to leave states with oppressive anti-female laws because THEY don't want to be prosecuted for the crime of providing healthcare, and follow that up by examining the cities in places like Texas that want to prosecute women for using state highways to LEAVE the state in order to receive proper reproductive healthcare.
Luxury beliefs my ass. It's only a luxury in his mind because these things don't impact him.
Painting your ideological opponents as "elite" and "out of touch" is a political trick as old as time, it encourages the listener not to engage the subject purportedly supported by the elite, but instead dismiss it out of hand as something no regular man should even bother themselves with.
Bonus points for making them elites in academia who apparently do not know how the "real word" works.
It is actually a means of pivoting to a different subject, and the next step is to make the subject the person doing the pivoting, and from there to change the entire scope of the discussion to the interpersonal dynamics of the parties involved in the discussion.
On the left (whom I would count myself among, even if I would hardly pass a purity test) there are many ways to do this, the key to all of them being that there's not a serious attempt to engage with the substance of the matter but simply to use an intersecting contextual facet as a means to collect the focus away from the topic and toward the discussant. Racism is probably the most straightforward path, or at least the most well-traveled (of the two mentioned in this thread, it would outrank abortion by being more generally applicable across age groups sexes religions etc) it goes "this isn't about x, x is really about racism. Your position on x implies you might be a racist. That position is personally offensive to me, who is directly or indirectly affected by racism." Done. conversation is now about people, and specifically two individual people, and specifically about the unfalsifiable statements about the feelings of one or both, and this is where it ends.
The right wing version of this trick, at least in the US, is much clumsier and ham-fisted but follows from the same motivation to replace the confrontation with an idea with a personal confrontation, though unlike the progressives they have only managed to devise one or two lasting variations of this same discussion-jamming measure: the pedophilia track and the socialist / communist sympathizer track.
I'm at a loss as to how to even attempt to have conversations in public about anything that matters due to the ever-present danger of one of these tactics surfacing and rendering the entire effort pointless. Perhaps we need to revive IRL coffee shop culture of small close circle debate from the 1800s, or import something like it from wherever a form of it still exists, maybe morocco or turkey.
Exactly. They certainly are not luxuries, and to some extent they’re not even beliefs - they’re acknowledgments about the way the world works, about modern systemic factors that impact the lives of historically oppressed populations.
Just because someone doesn’t recognize a word, doesn’t mean it’s some rarified hoity toity elitist folly - it’s ignorance; a lack of education or opportunity, nothing more.
There is not a state that will jail women for a failed pregnancy. Thank you for contributing to the ever-fucked up and misinformed conversation about abortion.
none of your links give any cases where a woman was prosecuted or jailed for a failed pregnancy.
The links did cite cases where medical practitioners did not do their job because they were worried about the government.
Texas law specifically states that abortions in the case of risk to the mother are ok and the medical practitioners felt the language wasnt clear enough.
Isn't the author's point that the examples correlate very highly with affluence? The fact that it may/may not be correlated to something else might be relevant, but I'm not seeing the relevance.