I transcribed the interview. http://cleandraws.com/2009/10/14/walter-benn-michaels-partial-transcript-of-interview-on-behind-the-news-with-doug-henwood/
Echoing Carrol, Michaels says:
"what race does for people on the left is turn politics into a kind of ethics for them. so they have a tremendous commitment to thinking of themselves as ethically superior to their opponents because their opponents are not simply people who support a different political construction, a very different political system, they are not people who are committed to the free market, they are people who are also racist. so we spend an incredible amount of time on the left trying to make sure our enenmies aren't just people who have strong ideological differences with us but are also bad people. i not only just think that is a complete waste of time and intellectual energy but I also think it's deeply misleading. it helps us misrecognize them."
So, trying to claim that Michaels's argument press's people's little identity buttons would be reverting to the use of identity to explain political disagreement. Bad juju! Bad!
If you read Michaels book, the argument is that all attempt to reduce social problems and debates to one of psychic attachments is obscurantist. it's mystification. It's not about identity formation, but about right and wrong, and right and wrong is about beliefs and beliefs are what we *argue* about. We should not argue about identity or by reference to identity, self understood or imposed on you by someone else. (i.e., that people are just so totally into their ethical superiority complexes)) It is useless to revert to claims about identity meant to explain why someone believes what they believe. This is the subject of Michaels' chapter on religion. It's either right or wrong, not an issue of identity formation and attachment to cultural practice.
This is why he writes the following with regard to homophobia and religion:
If, however, you think that homosexuality is wrong, it's hard to see how you can be accused of prejudice against gays, just as it's hard to see how people who think that fundamentalists are wrong can be accused of being prejudiced against them. Disapproval of what people do doesn't count as prejudice any more than disagreement with what people believe. So the good news for homophobes is that they're not bigots; they believe that homosexuality is wrong, and they have their reasons. But the bad news is that their reasons are so weak. Because while it's easy to see that homosexuality is bad if it goes against the laws of God, it's really hard to see much wrong with it if it doesn't go against the laws of God or if we don't believe there are any such things as the laws of God. So while the arguments against abortion don't rely on religions belief, the arguments against gay marriage seem to rely on almost nothing but religion belief. (and thus they must be argued about) ..
The trouble with diversity, from this perspective, is that it tries to imagine a world in which no one is a believer, as if even our belief in God (or our belief that there is no God) were just another aspect of our identity. But belief is at the heart of both our religion and politics, and insofar as the displacement of ideology by identity has helped bring religious beliefs to the fore, it cannot possibly make sense to keep pretending that the best way to deal with them is by asserting that religion has no place in politics. It has a lot more place in politics than race and culture do.