Ideas - The Boston Globe

Walter Benn Michaels reviews two novels in the Ideas Section of the Boston Sunday Globe for 10//9/05: Curtis Sittenfield's "Prep" and Tom Wolfe's "I am Charlotte Simmons". The review, entitled "Class Fictions", interests more than the novels reviewed.

Michaels understands that both novels make the same argument: That social class in America is a figment of the 'neoliberal imagination'. Or in short, that there is nothing wrong with inequity, as long as those on the wrong side of privilege aren't snubbed for it, but respected for their "cultural difference." This is what the novels argue, according to Michaels. He writes:

Classism is the pseudo-problem that brings left and right together: It's prejudice not poverty itself that counts. . . .Classism is what you're a victim of not because you’re poor but because people aren't nice to you because you're poor.


I don't care whether his take on the novels is correct. The article provides wonderful, intuitive, and lucid insight into contemporary American society. That neo-liberal gobbledygook has subverted its own tradition of true liberalism; that it has substituted 'feel-good equality' for the real pursuit of social justice, rings true. And, that the privileged would buy into this language of the new left approaches pathetic satire. Of course they do:

Almost always [the desire not to think about class difference in America] takes the form of insisting that class doesn't matter, that "In America," as New York Times columnist David Brooks. . .once wrote, "Nobody is better, nobody is worse." Of course it might be objected that, when it comes to being healthier, safer, freer, and happier, being rich does indeed make you better and that a more just society would imagine a more just distribution of money, health, safety, and freedom.


Those who supposedly care about social justice have turned the cause into a politics concerned more with self-esteem than social change: "a politics concerned with its opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia. . .and the idea that what we should do with difference is not eliminate it but appreciate it."

In this context, even the "subversive politics" of multiculturalism becomes mundane "diversity", because it suffers from the same twisted logic: 'respect the poor' becomes 'respect the Other'. "Diversity" becomes concerned with the above-quoted trio far more than it does with acting as a catalyst for real or subversive social change. Let's all 'appreciate' discrepancies in opportunity and wealth and be sure not to snub the less fortunate. Mighty white of us.