Affirmative Distraction
A lot of progressive politics today, Walter Benn Michaels complains, involves denouncing and apologizing for “bad things that happened a long time ago.” Government has its ___ History months and ___ Pride days. Business its diversity consultants and “heritage management firms.” Academia has its anti-hate rallies, dedicated, Michaels writes, “to combating a position that no one actually holds.” If these are familiar polemical targets, that is because, roughly since the term “political correctness” started appearing in national newsmagazines around 1990, conservative intellectuals have subjected the concepts of “diversity” and “identity politics” to a steady ideological barrage.
Like his predecessors, Michaels holds affirmative action at universities in low esteem, wants to get rid of race-based scholarships and worries that our diversity obsession — preoccupied as it is with race — “perpetuates the very concepts it congratulates itself on having escaped.” But his complaint with identity politics is ultimately a different one. Michaels is a self-described man of the left, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. In his snide and occasionally incisive book, he insists that fighting over race and gender is not an outgrowth of leftist egalitarianism but an alternative to it, a kind of progressives’ consolation prize, “at best a distraction and at worst an essentially reactionary position.” The real problem the left ought to be dealing with is what Michaels calls “class,” by which he means inequalities of income and wealth.
Now, diverse societies do appear less able, or less inclined, to redistribute money than homogeneous ones. The Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser have argued that American racial heterogeneity explains about half the gap between American and European welfare spending, and Thomas and Mary Edsall’s 1991 classic “Chain Reaction” described how a backlash against the civil rights movement resulted in a waning public willingness to support the welfare state through taxes. But this is not Michaels’s subject. In fact, he doesn’t believe race is a meaningful concept, either biologically or culturally, and he deals only in passing with the day-in, day-out politics of legislating for racial, ethnic and gender balance.
What interests Michaels is the ideology of diversity, particularly as it is enunciated in universities. For him, this ideology has a basic “trick” to it: “It treats economic difference along the lines of racial and sexual difference, thus identifying the problem not as the difference but as the prejudice (racism, sexism) against the difference.” As long as no one wishes ill to the poor, and as long as the poor are not made to feel inferior, there are no grounds for complaint, and no basis for attacking capitalism (or “neoliberalism,” as Michaels sometimes calls it). Diversity keeps the left barking up the wrong tree.
Michaels has a point. Diversity can be a powerful tool of self-legitimation for the rich. “A society free not only of racism but of sexism and of heterosexism,” he writes, “is a neoliberal utopia where all the irrelevant grounds for inequality (your identity) have been eliminated and whatever inequalities are left are therefore legitimated.” It makes sense that today’s Harvard undergraduates, as Michaels notes, should be more content with affirmative action than with a proposed campus maid service, which would reveal their economic advantages to others and to themselves. (Only 3 percent of students at selective universities come from the bottom socioeconomic quarter.) One sees why the liberal embrace of affirmative action has done nothing to dispel the Democratic Party’s image as elitist, and why the conservative claim that affirmative action waters down educational quality has not been accompanied by any conspicuous flight from universities. In Michaels’s view, universities are serving an extra-educational function, laundering privileges into qualifications.
So Michaels is not surprised that “multiculturalism could go from proclaiming itself a subversive politics to taking up its position as a corporate management tool ... in about 10 minutes and without having to make the slightest adjustment.” Newspapers focus on the millionaire bond trader who won a $12 million settlement when she sued Morgan Stanley for sexism in 2004, or on the female employees now suing Wal-Mart on the grounds that they make marginally less than their male co-workers — but not on the gap between Wal-Mart workers and Morgan Stanley ones, who earn 60 times as much.
Michaels does not so much develop an argument as state a point of view, which he then riffs on. One such riff is to describe various defenders of the diversity ideal as a “police force” for, the “human resources department” of and the “research and development division” of capitalism and the right. It is not clear whether he thinks diversity advocates play this role as well-meaning dupes or as cynical accomplices. Most of those who share Michaels’s diagnosis and his anger tend to run this argument in the opposite direction, to show that corporate America has, for a pittance, sold the country out to race radicals, feminists and gay activists. Indeed, this is the essence of much populist conservatism.
What makes this book different is its single-minded materialism. Race, culture, history, language, love — all that is not money melts into air. Michaels is fascinated by an episode of the reality show “Wife Swap,” in which a rural woman can’t stand the Park Avenue apartment she has traded into. “We find ourselves believing that run-down shacks in the woods are just as nice as Park Avenue apartments,” he writes, “especially if your husband remembers to thank you for chopping the wood when you get home from driving the bus.” He dismisses the complaints of the upper-middle-class residents of Alpharetta, Ga. — profiled in a New York Times series on class — that there’s not much diversity of income in their neighborhood. “The value of mixing rich people and poor people,” he says, “is real only if it contributes to the poor people becoming less poor, which is to say, if it decreases economic diversity.” Michaels brings up the impending extinction of the Mati Ke language of Northern Australia only to dismiss as sentimental any disquiet over it. “We ought to spend less time worrying about the disappearance of languages,” he writes, “and more time worrying about the disappearance of any credible alternative to unfettered capitalism.”
Michaels is vague about what his alternative to capitalism would look like, aside from a few details — universal child care, eliminating funding imbalances in public schools and abolishing private ones altogether. There is not so much a radical program here as a radical mood — one of nostalgia for the revolutionary politics of yesteryear. Michaels laments that since the cold war, “ideology’s claims to truth have come to seem irrelevant.”
But have they? More likely, the problem is that the ideological style of argument — of pitting an untainted abstraction such as “equality” or “progress” or “democracy” against the messy realities of complex modern societies — has come to seem dangerous. The main thing that capitalism and the diversity movement have in common is pragmatism. They draw their legitimacy from the spectacular failure of alternatives, not from their own freedom from internal contradictions. That is why people tolerate mending, not ending, diversity programs, and why they are a bit deaf, just now, to egalitarian schemes. Once burned, twice shy.
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