An Interview with Rob Henderson

Contributed by Charles B. Bratton II

Henderson’s lecture can be found at The Harvard Salient’s YouTube channel.

Rob Henderson is an author and political commentator known for his work on culture, social issues, and the dynamics of privilege. Raised in the foster home system, Henderson joined the US Air Force at the age of seventeen, and he eventually earned a BS from Yale University and a PhD in psychology from St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. He was a speaker at the fall 2024 Conservative and Republican Student Summit, an event co-hosted by the Salient.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SALIENT: Tell me about your upbringing. How did it shape who you became and lead you to where you are today?

HENDERSON: Living in seven different homes in Los Angeles County, I had a tumultuous early life. My earliest memories were of being taken from my mother when I was three and being placed in the foster care system. Then, I saw my foster siblings constantly moving homes—I befriended some of these kids, and then they would be taken. This cultivated a sense of unpredictability and this belief that whatever effort I might put in is ultimately meaningless. Who knows what tomorrow is going to look like?

Later, there was some stability in my life, such as blips of two or three stable years. But by the time I graduated from high school, I was eager to leave.

I had two part-time jobs in high school—one as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant and another as a bag boy at a supermarket. Many of my coworkers were older guys in their twenties. Being sixteen years old and making minimum wage, I thought these guys were cool because they would buy us substances that we wouldn't be able to get ourselves. But I remember wondering, “Is this who I want to be when I'm twenty-five—buying beer for a bunch of high schoolers at a party?” It's one thing to live that kind of life when you're seventeen, but to stay in that same mental space and job when you're twenty-five is sad. I recognized that going to college and the military was a way out.

In the military, I learned about the importance of structure, discipline, and motivation. Many people think that if you want to accomplish anything, you have to be motivated. But those eight years in the Air Force taught me that motivation is overrated. What matters is self-discipline, which is the ability to execute even if you don't feel motivated. What really matters is behavior.

Over time, I learned how to do things I hated, from the small things like waking up early in the morning to the longer tasks that the job entailed. I met people who were focused and disciplined and who cultivated these attributes of punctuality and integrity. I respected those things I wasn’t taught when I was a kid. These qualities reliably lead to better outcomes. 

Then, from the military, I went to Yale at age 25. I was one of the oldest students on campus. I had gone the first twenty-five years of my life without thinking deeply about my personal political views. I was raised by working-class Democrats, but it wasn't a political household, which itself was a class marker—how much you talked about politics at the dinner table. Usually, educated families love to talk about current events and global issues. 

But then I got to Yale and saw students expressing strange opinions I had never heard, many of whom were hard-working. To get into a place like Harvard or Yale, you have to be at the top of your game. Yet, I saw many students, professors, and graduates of these places denigrate the very habits that led them to these schools. They'd work very hard, but then their public stance was that hard work was unimportant and that everything ultimately comes down to systemic forces, a bit of luck, and factors beyond your control. 

In their private lives, they exercise a lot of agency, focus, and discipline to adhere to a rigid structure for their studies, exercise routines, internships, networking, and everything else. Everything is so meticulously planned, but then, publicly, they would proclaim this relativism, saying that it's no one's fault if someone fails.

It was hard for me to square that circle. I saw in my own life the difference between how I acted when I was focused and responsible versus when I was unfocused and irresponsible. Gradually, I learned that students from elite places wield so much influence in society. The stories we tell ourselves, the aspirations we want to live up to, and the ideals we exalt seem to be an abdication of responsibility. Privately, they will adhere to these behaviors and habits. Yet, publicly, there is no comment, or they take the opposite stance, saying that those things are unimportant. This was the impetus for my term luxury beliefs. 

SALIENT: You’ve written about how these elite practices and luxury beliefs can become commonplace, originating in upper-class society and then being adopted by the lower class.

How did you view this phenomenon, especially from a first-generation, low-income perspective? After all, the top 1% are more represented than the bottom 60% at elite institutions.

HENDERSON: One feature of this “luxury beliefs” concept I coined is that it draws from the cyclical nature of fashion. If a new article of clothing debuts on the runway, you'll see it at a discount five years later. And I think the same is true for many “prestigious” movements. 

I use the idea of the early rarity and prestige of obtaining spices. Once the commoners obtained spice, the European elites abandoned their preference for flavorful food. There's this desire to stand apart from the masses. I cite this great book from 2021 called WASPs: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy by Michael Duxbury. He writes about how the WASPs, the ruling class in America from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, would support certain movements that the masses abhorred. They liked that if the conventional opinion takes the opposite stance, it makes you look interesting and sophisticated. The concept of “luxury belief” is not new. I conceived this term, but the phenomenon is surprisingly old.

The 1881 novel Portrait of a Lady by Henry James describes how the radicals of the upper class take certain views because these are luxuries for them. It doesn't harm their position, but it makes them feel good. I'm paraphrasing, but he uses the term “the radicals within the upper class.”

I do think more beliefs have taken this prominence because material goods have become more affordable, a noisier signal of one's social position. If you walked around Boston one hundred years ago, you could immediately tell who was rich or poor just by how they dressed. Today, that's less true. How do you now indicate that you're a member of the modern aristocracy? It's through these newfangled and unusual opinions. 

SALIENT: Is the upper class continuously trying to devise these luxury beliefs as markers of status?

HENDERSON: I don't know how much of this is conscious. Probably 10%, maybe 20%, of affluent upper and middle-class people hold luxury beliefs. Maybe 10% to 20% of those people are malicious. They do experience some glee from socially dominating other people; however, I think that much of that aggression is actually channeled toward members of their own social class. In my book, I point out that I would see students at Yale happily announce how investment banks were emblematic of capitalist greed and oppression. A week later, you would see those same students at recruitment sessions for Goldman Sachs. Over time, I came to believe that they were trying to eliminate their rivals. If I can convince you that investment banks are evil, that's one less person with whom I have to compete for a JP Morgan internship.

I think most people with luxury beliefs are sincere. They are good at self-deception and seeing themselves doing the right thing. They receive accolades and applause and finger snaps from their peers, and suddenly, they believe that defunding the police or decriminalizing hard drugs are good ideas.

The problem is, though, that most people who attend these institutions have had little contact with the real world. Most graduates from Yale and Harvard have never had a twenty-minute conversation with someone without a bachelor's degree. 

I don't think I wrote about this in my book, but this is a story I've told elsewhere. The day after the presidential election in 2016, I was on campus. I went to class. There were supposed to be twenty people in this research methods class, but the only people who showed up were me and one of the female students. There's no professor and no other students, and we're looking at each other confused. Then the professor sends us an email saying it's a dark day in democracy, and for now, we should take this time to reflect, postponing class to next week. 

Other students had the same experience. If you walked around Yale the day after the election, it was a ghost town. I saw students and grown men crying. But the dining staff were still working and feeding these people. The landscapers were still cutting the grass. The custodial staff were mopping floors. They didn't have the luxury of taking the day off. If you asked elite students and graduates who will be harmed by a politician like Trump, they would claim that it's those people. But those people are still showing up to work. These experiences irritated me.

SALIENT: As I was reading about luxury beliefs, the hierarchy of needs came to mind. These blue-collar workers were focused on feeding their families. They didn't have the luxury of worrying about the election outcome. 

HENDERSON: That was one of the interesting surprises. I grew up in poor and working-class parts of California. There was a common view that elites don't care about politics—it's a game for them. I absorbed some of the idea that it’s all a puppet show. As I spent time at Yale, I discovered it's the opposite: no one cares more about politics than graduates of elite universities. 

Most Americans aren't watching the presidential debates. Around 60% of Americans vote. The majority of those people have college degrees. In reality, it’s people near the bottom who are more apathetic about politics. Who wins? Who loses? I still have to clock in at 9 a.m. and work my minimum-wage job. However, since the elites have met their hierarchy of needs, they can focus on how society should be run.

That was a shock to me. I write in my book about the publications students are expected to follow. At Yale, students would ask, “Did you read this article in The New York Times or The Atlantic?” I would say, “No.” But gradually, I learned that it is part of assimilating into this higher class—you must have not only a cursory awareness of the news but also the right opinion about it.

SALIENT: I had a similar experience coming to Harvard from a rural, low-income background. I regularly had friends here at Harvard who would quote Greek philosophy and other abstract ideas. To have a conversation with these people, I had to have an idea of what they were talking about.

You talk about the different manners, tastes, opinions, and conversational styles into which upper-class people are born. What was most helpful for you in going to Yale and then on to Cambridge?

HENDERSON: I was glad I went when I did. Because I'd spent eight years in the military, I learned how to be an adult and carry myself. But it was still a difficult transition. I had never been to so many formal events in my life, and I had to learn quickly how to operate in those environments.

One of the difficulties was swallowing my pride. Yes, I'm older, and I had all these difficult early life experiences. Then, I was in the military. Surrounded by younger people with more comfortable lives, I spent much time dropping my preconceptions, interacting with students, and trying my best to get along. But I do write about what the strange interactions revealed to me and about the stark class divides in this country.

I remember one Asian female student telling me about her tiger mom and how difficult it was that her mom always expected her to go to a place like Yale. And she said, “But I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.” I said, “Yeah, you're like me. I'm half Korean on my mom's side, but I didn't really have that kind of childhood.” And she replied, “Oh, okay. So you didn't have a traumatic childhood.” That's her response because, in her mind, that's what trauma is. It's having a mom with strict expectations.

Some of them could tell I was older and might know I was in the military, but they didn’t know anything more. I'm grateful because I think students were more unfiltered around me. Those were still formative years, and I couldn't have left unchanged from the undergraduate experience at Yale. It was intellectually fulfilling, but it was strange.