There’s an idea that’s been floating around for a few years that when it comes to marriage, wealthy elites hold luxury beliefs.
What does that mean? Rob Henderson — who popularized “luxury beliefs” in 2019 and has a book coming out next month that recounts his childhood in the foster care system — defines the term as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” In a recent interview with Yascha Mounk, Henderson shared a story that illustrates what that means to him when it comes to marriage:
I had a conversation with a former Yale classmate who was telling me that monogamy is outdated and that marriage is this kind of patriarchal, outmoded institution. And then I asked her how she grew up. She was raised by a two-parent family, stable structure. I asked her, when she’s finished with law school and wherever she goes next (at this point, she was working for a tech company and applying to law schools), if and when you have a family, how do you want to do that? And she said: “I’ll probably end up getting married, having a husband and have that kind of conventional family life. But just because I want to do it doesn’t mean it should have to be for everyone. And I do think that marriage is problematic,” and so on. And I thought this is interesting, because she benefited from this institution, she intends to carry the benefits of those institutions forward to her own children, but her official public position is that people shouldn’t have to do this, or she’s publicly denigrating it and saying, “Actually, don’t do this,” or that it’s problematic or oppressive in some way.
He said that this kind of elite belief expressed by his classmate had a trickle-down negative cultural influence. Additionally, he thinks that these ideas reveal a hypocrisy among liberals who recognize the value of marriage as an institution but who stop short of extolling “the ideal of the two-parent family.” Henderson said liberal elites avoid talking about the norms they pass on to their children because they’re afraid to sound judgmental: “They don’t want to feel like a schoolmarm wagging their finger at how people live their lives.”
I don’t doubt that Henderson heard these marriage-is-outmoded beliefs expressed by his Yale peers. But I think he’s inflating how pervasive, lasting or influential his classmate’s view is; most young people still expect to get married, and the numbers haven’t changed much over time.
Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research has tracked high school seniors’ attitudes toward marriage since the 1970s. It found that the percentage of seniors who said they didn’t expect to marry has remained pretty consistent from 1976 to 2020, and that percentage was very, very low: In 1976 it was 6 percent, and in 2020 it was 5 percent. When you look at the percentage who said they did expect to marry, the numbers similarly haven’t changed much: In 1976, 74 percent said they expected to marry, compared with 71 percent in 2020. (The third option was “no idea,” which, honestly, I thought would be more popular among teenagers.) Considering how cynical Gen Z is about most major societal institutions, it’s remarkable how pro-marriage they are.
On the point that elites are perceived to be unwilling to be boosters for marriage because it might seem too judgmental, I am, again, skeptical — particularly since a lot of the folks who like to rail against elites are Ivy Leaguers.
But to the extent that liberals aren’t constantly banging the drum for marriage, my sense is that it’s because the benefits of marriage and two-parent families are pretty obvious to most Americans already. It’s not some big secret that having more resources and increasing the number of loving adults in a child’s life makes parenting easier.