Luxury beliefs are status symbols

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.

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.

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.

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?