The 2016 presidential election may have transformed Walter Benn Michaels from pariah to prophet of doom. In 2006, the University of Illinois at Chicago English professor published the polemic The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, which makes the unpopular argument that liberalism’s single-minded obsession with diversity is a tool used by elites to distract from the greater evils of worker exploitation and economic inequality. Michaels argues that social justice is perceived as served if the top classes at Ivy League colleges contain a percentage of women, black people, and Latinos proportionate to the population—ignoring the lack of opportunity for those who don’t go to college. Likewise, it’s considered a victory if minorities or women become executives at Fortune 500 companies, whether or not workers at those companies are paid a living wage. In other words, liberals are OK with inequality so long as it’s diverse inequality. Diversity, according to Michaels, is the moral alibi for the excesses of the winner-take-all nature of capitalism. The Democrats’ emphasis on identity, he anticipated, would weaken the electoral viability of the party because it had so little to offer the working class.
In his UIC office recently, Michaels reflected on the legacy of his book and what it means in the aftermath of the presidential election.
The Democratic primary produced a version of this philosophic split. Some people complained about the book—with some justice—that it’s one-note about economic inequality and redistribution. Sanders got a lot of those same criticisms—that he only had one message. Now, as you saw by the end of the campaign when he was giving a stump speech, everyone in the room knew it by heart and was chanting it. That’s not a bad thing. That’s called organizing people. If you’re in a position where people know what you stand for on the issues, then they’re not confused and they’re there exactly because they know what you stand for.
For forever, rich people have liked to think of themselves as richer and morally superior to poor people. To try to make a political project out of that in a democracy is hard. It was this thing among the Democrats this year: “It’s bullshit to attribute the rise of Trump to the economic stuff among the working class. The real issue is their racism.” I have no doubts that a lot of Trump supporters are racist. But racism doesn’t come from nowhere. Racism isn’t like some kind of moral failing; there’s a political economy behind it. When people attempt to think about what’s caused their own economic situation, they get a bad diagnosis of it.
Why does discrimination have to be mutually exclusive? Can’t the left focus on an agenda of both antiracism and antiexploitation?
I don’t know the numbers from the election, but from what I understand, the people that make under $30,000 once again didn’t appear to vote in large numbers. You have a lot of working-class people that don’t think there’s much at stake for them in voting. In theory, that’s not a problem for GOP, but it is for Democrats—or would be if they were aiming for a working-class movement. It’s important to not turn the election into a morality test; it’s hard to get people to vote for you if they don’t see that they have some interest, something at stake. If they’re convinced from the start that there’s nothing you’re going to do for them, then they’re not going to want to do anything for you.
