We live in the age of diversity ideology, a worldview that ostensibly aims to uplift the socially marginalized. Diversity ideology’s advocates present it as a grassroots movement propelled by the downtrodden, but it is now the rhetorical currency of big business, the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, universities, powerful philanthropic foundations, h.r. departments everywhere, the Democratic Party, even many Republicans. Diversity as ideology shouldn’t be confused with diversity itself, which tends to engender tolerance, sophistication, and cosmopolitanism. On the contrary, diversity ideology is narrow and parochial. It is a divisive, hollowed-out form of progressivism used to distract and channel legitimate popular grievances into destructive, often petty squabbles. Elites and elite institutions find diversity ideology useful because it keeps the working class divided and distracted. One of the more striking aspects of diversity ideology is reluctance to criticize it across most of the American left. This, even as corporations and the state have been increasingly open in their appeals to diversity ideology to legitimize profiteering, mass surveillance, and imperial warfare. Recall progressive congressman Jamie Raskin’s letter describing Moscow as “a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred.” Nonetheless, on the activist left, the conviction remains that identity politics somehow add up to a more “inclusive” form of class struggle from below. In reality, the opposite is true: Diversity ideology offers a highly effective way to wage class war from above—a ruling-class strategy with a long pedigree in the United States. The logic of pitting people against each other as a method of elite rule is old and well understood. Indeed, one of the greatest political essays of the modern era, James Madison’s Federalist 10, explains exactly how keeping the people divided is essential to maintaining ruling-class hegemony. Written in 1787 to urge ratification of the new Constitution, Federalist 10 addressed elite concerns that political democracy would lead to economic democracy. As the Constitution moved toward ratification many propertied men worried that this new form of government would be their undoing. Madison disagreed. The solution to class conflict was, he argued, more conflict and more kinds of conflict. The operative word in Federalist 10 is “faction”—essentially, what we now call “interest groups.” As Madison explained: “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest.” Faction has myriad causes: geography, creed, gender, age, ethnicity, language. However, as Madison explained, “the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors,” also form distinct interests. Forms of faction “grow up of necessity in civilized nations,” Madison explained, “and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.” In a representative democracy, “regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of ... government.” Eliminating faction was, for Madison, almost impossible, its causes being “sown in the nature of man.” The causes ranged widely: a “zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points ... attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power.” Indeed, people were, “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.” The danger, Madison argued, wasn’t faction itself, but the rise of a majority faction based on that “most common and durable source” of conflict: the “unequal distribution of property.” When “a majority is included in a faction,” it could use democracy “to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens”—that is, the rights of the rich. However, when “a faction consists of less than a majority, it may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.” There being “no cure for the mischiefs of faction,” the only solution was to lean into the problem: that is, to fight the economic threat of a majoritarian class faction by encouraging as many other forms of faction as possible. As Madison explained, “the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party” and “the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression.” Madison’s solution had the logic of a judo throw in which the wrestler harnesses his opponent’s weight and momentum. Faction was the problem but, paradoxically, more of it was the solution. A “greater variety of parties and interests,” Madison explained, “make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive.” When “such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” And “where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by [the] distrust” caused by proliferating factions. In other words, the multiplication of interest groups thwarts class struggle and the development of class consciousness. Or as Madison put it, there was “greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest.” More faction meant “greater obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority.” With the majority of asset-less and working people fragmented into as many political subsets as possible, radical leaders would be more easily contained and defeated. “The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame ... but will be unable to spread a general conflagration. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union.” According to Madison, the fear that democracies are “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property” was based on the erroneous belief “that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.” In fact, “so strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.” Thus, to rule within a democratic framework, economic elites had merely to weaponize the human propensity toward conflict while observing a cardinal rule: anything but class . The trick was to encourage the proliferation of factions and let the swarm of hyper-variegated interest groups throw themselves at the machinery of government. The alternative, after all, might be a unified faction of those who share economic interests contrary to those of the propertied class. To see how the logic of faction outlined by Madison guides diversity ideology, consider the prevalent tendency to view all social issues today through the lens of “disparity”—that is, in terms of which race, gender, sexual orientation, or age cohort suffers most from a given problem. Take poverty. Most measurements of poverty refuse to describe the poor as a class—that is, as a whole. The Census Bureau’s report on “Poverty in America 2021” offers total numbers and percentages of people who are poor by: race and Hispanic origin, sex, age, immigration status, region, residence, work experience, disability status, and educational attainment. These statistical descriptions of how poverty affects different groups differently paints a picture you are already familiar with: It hits women harder than hits men, people of color more than whites, and so on. Repeating statistics about how poverty impacts this or that ever-more-variegated status group habituates us to seeing poverty as a collection of fragments—as a mere element of other problems. But racism and sexism in isolation don’t explain the existence or persistence of poverty: They explain its unequal distribution across demographic groups. Only an analysis focused on the exploitation (not oppression) of the producing classes by the owning classes explains why there is so much poverty amid such colossal accumulations of wealth. If you want a picture of the poor as a whole, if you want a portrait of that class, the Census Bureau and the foundations, by and large, won’t give it to you. You will have to compile those numbers yourself. As soon as one does create a profile of the poor as a class, the primacy of race and gender fades a bit and the primacy of class stands out. Thus, according to US Census numbers, in 2019 about 34 million Americans, or 12 percent of the population, lived at or below the poverty line. Of these, roughly 42 percent identified as “White, not Hispanic.” Include white Latinos, and that goes up to 56 percent. In other words, most poor people are white. About 8 million, or 23 percent of the poor, identify as African American. Thus, black people are overrepresented among the poor at a rate of about 180 percent, yet they are nonetheless a minority of the poor. About 26 percent of the poor are “Hispanic Any Race,” meaning they are also a bit overrepresented. Finally, 4 percent of the class identify as Asian. Meanwhile, the most important ratio of all is rarely discussed: 100 percent of the poor are impoverished. Why do we so rarely discuss poverty in this fundamental sense? Why are sociologists and economists not putting their heads together to figure out why this diverse class exists? The answer is that doing so leads us back to that “most common and durable source of factions,” namely, the “unequal distribution of property... Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors.” We might stray from the confines of disparity discourse and wander into the terrain of absolute economic exploitation, how it works, whom it benefits, and how it is reproduced. Put differently, and with apologies to Hillary Clinton, ending racism won’t break up the banks. Talking about class in absolute terms offers a basis for a dangerous political unity. It offers the basis for a majority faction of all those who work for a living pitted against those who own the means of production. And as Madison explained, “to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction is the great object to which our inquiries are directed.” The diversity worldview, Walter Benn Michaels has argued, holds that justice would be achieved if 13 percent of the richest 1 percent were black, and if only 13 percent of prisoners were black. To be sure, this would be a less racist arrangement than the current demographic skew of America’s class hierarchy, in which white people are overrepresented among the top 1 percent and underrepresented among the poorest 10 percent. But changing the racial distribution of class outcomes wouldn’t, in itself, change class relations, nor would it systematically reduce poverty. On the contrary, over the past several decades, we have seen measures of diversity improve even as poverty and exploitation have worsened. The share of women and people of color at the apex of corporate power have increased steadily, and nearly every major institution has invested considerable resources in reducing disparity and diversifying student bodies and work forces. But at the same time, the economic conditions of most people across all demographic subgroups have stagnated or even deteriorated. Wealth is more concentrated than ever in the hands of the ultra-rich, while working people of all demographics face declining prospects. The American leftist concession that “race is how we talk about class” has it all wrong. Race is how we do not talk about class. Gender, sexual orientation, national origin, physical disability, and psychiatric diagnosis are other ways that we don’t talk about class. But thanks to our collective national habituation to the political logic of Federalist 10, many on the left imagine that the sum total of the fragmented, and fragmenting, fights against disparity will somehow add up to class justice, the equitable distribution of society’s economic output. It won’t. Christian Parenti is a professor of economics at John Jay College, CUNY. His most recent book is Radical Hamilton