I hasten to add that progressives had not lost sight of enduring injustice. It was plain to see in the patterns of policing and criminal justice, housing, banking, and employment. There was still much work to do. But the rhetorical and ideological center of gravity had shifted. The progressive claim to moral legitimacy was less the demand for economic equality or even economic fairness, and more the demand for racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual inclusion and the recognition it implied. Built on the gains generated by three generations of multicultural education, “diversity” defined by the demand for recognition and approval became the byword. The advantage of this ideological shift was that it created the artifice of concern for the marginalized while retaining the newly found economic, educa-tional, and political advantages of elites. By shifting its focus from equality to diversity, progressives could now downplay, ignore, or otherwise dismiss the interests of struggling working-class people and their families—a demographic that would eventually include millions and millions of Trump voters.
The irony runs deeper still. Not only did the new progressives abandon the critique of capitalism and their defense of the interests of the working class and poor, they came to embrace bourgeois economic and cultural values. The injuries that had become more central to identity politics would now be evaluated against upper-middle-class norms of status, material comfort, mental health, and social in-dependence, which meant that the measure of inclusion was now the income, lifestyles, and social respectability of the middle and upper-middle class.”
In these ways, progressives came to redefine America’s meritocracy. Unlike the WASP meritocracy, the new meritocracy would be, in principle, multicultural (though the progressive activist demographic is overwhelmingly white). But like the old meritocracy, wealth and privilege would be concentrated in ways that would be self-protective of its status, political power, and economic interest through such strategies as exclusionary zoning, legacy college admissions, favorable tax law, and barriers to economic and educational opportunities. And very much like the old meritocracy, perhaps even more so, upward mobility into the echelons of the elite would be accompanied by a corresponding elitism, the smug sense of being on the winning side of history.