Does neoliberalism makes us obsess about diversity in order to make us forget about class inequality?

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"Ungrateful conservatives often complain about the political correctness of liberals, but the liberalism that strives to achieve equality by celebrating diversity is a liberalism that every conservative should love and that opponents of the liberal elite have put to good use. What the commitment to diversity seeks is not a society in which there are no poor people but one in which there's nothing wrong with being poor, a society in which poor people - like blacks and Jews and Asians - are respected. And in the effort to create such a world, liberalism has ended up playing a useful if no doubt unintended role, the role of supplying the right with just the kind of left it wants. What the right wants is culture wars instead of class wars because as long as the wars are about identity instead of money, it doesn't matter who wins. And the left gives it what it wants".

Walter Benn Michaels (2006), The Trouble with Diversity. How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, New York, Holt: 109.

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