[Peace-discuss] Identity politics vs. class politics

[C. G. Estabrook]

[It is often pointed out that the holy trinity of American 
left/liberalism -- gender, race, and class -- are not alike: the first 
two contradictions (female/male, black/white) can be solved by 
reconciliation, but not the third (exploited/exploiter).  The following 
review from the New York Observer suggests that this book is a 
worthwhile discussion of the theme. --CGE]

	Wit and Sharp Argument
	Skewer a Damaging Euphemism

	The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity
	and Ignore Inequality, by Walter Benn Michaels.
	Metropolitan, 241 pages, $23.

	By: Chris Lehmann
	Date: 1/29/2007

The last decade and more of American public life will be remembered, 
among other things, for the triumph of euphemism. Not only did 
bellicosity become “moral clarity” and military invasion turn into the 
promotion of freedom, but many issues on the domestic front were 
strategically rebranded as well: Religious charities became “faith-based 
initiatives,” netting in the process hundreds of millions in government 
grants, and schemes to privatize Social Security won the inoffensive 
moniker of “retirement-savings accounts.”

It’s fitting, then, that an English professor, Walter Benn Michaels, 
from the University of Illinois at Chicago, should be taking full aim at 
one of our age’s most characteristic -— and most troubling -— shifty 
linguistic turns: the bid to recast racial-cum-cultural conflict as a 
struggle to achieve “diversity.” A sweeping, unobjectionable and 
ultimately bland social ideal, diversity has smoothly supplanted more 
politically charged notions of equity and justice in debates over the 
material deficits in American racial and ethnic life. Nowhere was this 
elision more plain than in the symbolic crusade to diversify the racial 
and linguistic ranks of federal officialdom, initiated by the 
Clinton-era pledge to have a cabinet that “looked more like America” —- 
an aim whose hollowness was promptly exposed by the Bush administration, 
which appointed a yet more racially diverse group of senior advisors to 
preside over far more divisive policies of malign economic neglect. What 
we want is not for cabinets to resemble the nation they serve, but 
rather for them to make that nation fairer, more equitable and less 
economically cruel.

But as Mr. Michaels notes in his sharply argued polemic *The Trouble 
with Diversity*, that tends to be the very point of the jargon of 
diversity: It allows us not to talk about the increasingly rigid 
partition of our society along class lines. For as we enthusiastically 
fine-tune our sensibilities about how cultural or racial groupings can 
best be spoken about or symbolized, most social goods in our country —- 
health care, affordable housing and higher education, income support, a 
living wage —- drift further and further out of reach for many ordinary 
Americans. This is far from accidental, Mr. Michaels says; the marketing 
of cultural diversity as a social desideratum has crowded out any clear 
understanding —- especially on the left end of the political spectrum —- 
of how class privilege operates in America today.

Examples abound, but Mr. Michaels correctly focuses on the fetishizing 
of racial difference -— a tic shared among partisans of every 
ideological persuasion -— as the key factor in the flight from a 
class-based politics. Mr. Michaels doesn’t deny the persistence of 
racism, but notes that it’s been significantly downgraded: “Racism has 
been privatized,” he writes, “converted from a political position into a 
personal failing.” And Americans romance nothing quite so ardently as 
remedies for a personal failing: The mandate to appreciate the anodyne 
ideal of “cultural diversity” -— itself a labored euphemism for the 
defeat of structural racism -— “gives us a vision of difference without 
equality,” since all cultures in this view of things are equally worthy 
of respect. And this central reverie, Mr. Michaels argues, means that 
“the political commitment to equality involves not creating it (by, say, 
redistributing wealth) but just insisting that it’s already there.”

This brazen lie has permitted the extravagant trade in 
corporate-sponsored diversity appreciation to flourish. Mr. Michaels 
notes, for example, that a former president of Dartmouth has used his 
office to sponsor anti-hate rallies on campus, and that a clutch of 
“heritage management firms” have set up shop to research older 
companies’ past racial transgressions and help manage the public-apology 
strategies for same. This is to say nothing of still crasser 
undertakings, like the “Show Me the Money Diversity Venture Capital 
Conference” and -— yes -— the “Diversity Rocks Classic Thong,” which 
permits its user both to “show your support for multiculturalism” and 
“put an end to panty lines.”

Perhaps if such excesses were simply exercises in commodifying one’s 
beliefs, they would be fairly unobjectionable —- encouraging signs of 
progress, even, since one can only successfully market on a mass scale 
ideas that have decisively joined the mainstream. But as Mr. Michaels 
observes, diversity-speak does its greatest mischief when misapplied to 
social inequality. By adopting the passive tolerance preached by 
diversity consultants to matters of economic opportunity, we confuse the 
fundamental issue: “[W]e have started to treat economic difference as if 
it were cultural difference,” Mr. Michaels writes. “So now we’re urged 
to be more respectful of poor people and to stop thinking of them as 
victims, since to treat them as victims is condescending —- it denies 
them their ‘agency.’ And if we stop thinking of the poor as people who 
have too little money and start thinking of them instead as people who 
have too little respect, then it’s our attitude toward the poor, not 
their poverty, that becomes the problem to be solved, and we can focus 
our efforts of reform not on getting rid of classes but on getting rid 
of what we like to call classism.”

(I should add that Mr. Michaels kindly acknowledges in a footnote some 
of my own published criticisms of the “classist” fallacy.)

In reality, of course, the whole notion of encouraging economic 
diversity is farcical: A sane view of social justice involves decreasing 
the number of poor people, and hence reducing economic diversity. 
“Indeed,” Mr. Michaels writes, “since economic diversity is just another 
name for economic inequality, it’s hard to see why we would want to 
promote it.”

And yet that’s precisely what much of the American left seems content to 
do —- or at least to continue flogging the inert social facts of 
cultural diversity over and against any universalist view of economic 
justice. The diversity crusade —- together with its gender-sensitive 
variants —- has turned the American left into “something like the human 
resources department of the right,” Mr. Michaels argues. Instead of 
accepting the standard vision of a bitterly polarized right-and-left 
political landscape, he suggests that “we might more plausibly describe 
contemporary politics and contemporary political argument as nothing but 
a dispute between our reactionaries and our conservatives. The 
reactionaries are the ones who attack diversity, the conservatives are 
the ones who defend it; the reactionaries are the ones who think our 
inequalities are justified, the conservatives are the ones who think we 
don’t have any, or, more precisely, that the ones we do have are the 
products of prejudice, of treating people as if they were worse than we 
are.”

Such sentiments are bound to anger many bien-pensant liberals, who 
cleave to diversity rhetoric because it provides much the same powerful 
rush that “moral certainty” grants to propagandists for the war on 
terror. As Mr. Michaels puts it: “What American liberals want is for our 
conservatives to be racists ... We want a fictional George Bush who 
doesn’t care about black people rather than the George Bush we’ve 
actually got, one who doesn’t care about poor people.”

At times, Mr. Michaels does let his rhetoric run away with his argument, 
as when, inveighing against the idolatry of racial heritage for its own 
sake, he approvingly quotes Henry Ford’s toweringly smug maxim, “History 
is bunk.” (Of course, Mr. Michaels -— a pillar of the “new historicist” 
school of literary criticism —- cannot hew completely to Ford’s 
presentist nay-saying; he criticizes, for example, the counterfactual 
flourishes in Philip Roth’s recent fantasia of American anti-Semitism, 
*The Plot Against America*.) Still, he has produced that rarity in the 
present idea-starved forum of American political debate: a closely 
reasoned, genuinely impassioned call to revive a left politics of 
economic justice. Perhaps if enough people heed it, we can trade in the 
managed sensitivity of the human-resources department for a robust 
political movement that can at last start calling greed, privilege and 
class prerogative by their true names.

Chris Lehmann is an editor at CQ Weekly and the author of Revolt of the 
Masscult.


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