Giles Fraser writes:
According to the socialist academic Walter Benn Michaels,
the reason that rich western liberals talk so much about racism and sexism is
so they don’t have to talk so much about economic inequality.
He published The
Trouble with Diversity exactly
a decade ago, but it feels like a tract for our times, perfectly suited as a
provocation to thought as we approach the summing up of liberalism’s great
annus horribilis.
Rich western liberals, Michaels
argues, don’t want to challenge the economic structures that produce
inequality because that might seriously impact on their own standing and
wealth.
Instead they insist on the elite being as diverse as the poor, as a way
to justify the very existence of the elite.
So, as long as the top class at
Harvard shows a proportionate distribution of social diversity, one can happily
ignore the fact that all the students come from money.
Moreover, it’s not just
that this focus on diversity distracts from the deeper issue of economic
inequality.
It’s worse, because the very diversity of the elite is asserted as
justification for the non-discriminatory nature of capitalism.
Diversity has
become the moral alibi of neoliberal economics.
It’s not that Michaels is against
diversity per se. He absolutely isn’t.
But he thinks it misses the bigger
picture when the struggle to achieve wage equality between men and women at
some warehouse job is touted as a major victory when neither the men nor the
women can actually live off what the warehouse is paying them.
Likewise, when a
battle is won for women at some merchant bank to earn the same squillions as
the men, yes, it’s a victory.
But both victories leave the most fundamental
injustice perfectly intact: inequality.
Since the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the US has
become a much fairer society in terms of race and gender.
No doubt there is a
way to go, in some places a very long way to go, but the progress has been
considerable nonetheless.
But during this exact same period, the US has also,
steadily and continuously, become more and more unequal, the gap between rich
and poor widening to a level that now threatens the very stability of these
disunited states.
And it’s in this gap that Donald
Trump has turned his
knife.
The issue, of course, is
capitalism.
And that the mainstream of both political parties refused to pull
at the thread of its failures.
Clinton Democrats and Bush Republicans
subscribed to the view that global neoliberalism was a good thing, with
Democrats combining this commitment with a (roughly speaking) civil
rights/affirmative action tradition and Republicans with
a (roughly speaking) socially conservative/evangelical Christian tradition.
Interestingly, of the two, it is the Democratic pairing
that makes the more natural fit – for neoliberal capitalism may produce
winner-take-all winners and lose-it-all losers, but it is nevertheless an
economic system that is indifferent to colour, gender or creed.
Which is why
capitalism is sometimes held up as a means of affirmative action – e.g. the pink
pound.
If a Muslim woman is better at doing the job than a white man, the logic
of capitalism is entirely non-discriminatory. She rightly gets the job.
Thus
capitalism is applauded as an agent of social progress.
And yet the poor get
poorer and the rich get richer.
It took two political outsiders
to say this: Bernie
Sanders and Trump.
The
former said it responsibly, respectful of the many moral gains that the era of
liberalism brought about.
The latter saw a gap and viciously exploited it,
turning the resentful white poor against other poor minorities who are
themselves as much a victim of the machinery of capitalism.
A decade ago, the
critics of Walter Benn Michaels thought he was doing something similar, playing
women and people of colour off against poor white middle America.
Why can’t
social justice mean a commitment to both social diversity and economic
equality?
Yes, it can and it should.
But only when wealthy liberals appreciate
that, in and of itself, the struggle for diversity does little to benefit the
poor.
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