The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority.

Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12 weeks subscription in print and online.

Plus, we'll give you a £20 £20,000 Amazon gift voucher, absolutely free.

Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power, and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America,

a presidential election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one, because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined today by Rob Henderson, who is the author, the best-selling author, I should say, of Troubled, a memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class, which is a brilliant and very harrowing book.

And Rob is also very well known now for being the

coiner. That's the right term. The coiner of the term, luxury beliefs. And Rob,

you are probably sick to death of explaining what luxury beliefs is. So I think I'd start by

let me try and say it. And then if I get it wrong, you can sort of correct me.

Luxury beliefs are opinions, which upper class people wear as kind of baubles to signal to

others that they are upper class.

They have effectively replaced sort of jewelry in the 17th or 18th century as ways in which people can show to other members of their class that they hold these opinions.

And often these opinions are almost deliberately aimed at causing the working class's pain.

So that's right.

Luxury beliefs do elevate the status of those who hold them, especially in their

peer groups in these sort of rarefied upper segments of society.

It confer status to those people to express these viewpoints.

And then as a consequence, it does often cause harm to people sort of lower down the socioeconomic

ladder. Sometimes it's intentional. I think certain people do hold these views with malicious

...