[1] Known for challenging the "prevailing trends of postmodernist theory," Michaels has produced works connecting postmodernism, neoliberal capitalism, and socioeconomic inequality.
Second, a new form of liberal ideology, perhaps best expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), proclaimed the eternal victory of neoliberal capitalism.
Lastly, social conditions in neoliberal capitalist economies were increasingly characterized by staggering inequality, whereby almost all gains were captured by an elite minority while the middle and working classes saw their real wages decline.
Michaels claims that the death of "intentional meaning" as a result of the postmodern shift in literary theory has had the effect of depoliticizing the economic impoverishment that characterizes the modern era.
In The Beauty of a Social Problem,[4][5] Michaels argues that there is a major disconnect between what neoliberalism is purportedly dedicated to — the equality of people’s various identities — and the economic inequality produced by capitalism, while postmodernism makes it impossible to criticize such outcomes as choices:[2]For once we think of the beholder as playing a role in the production of the work’s meaning, we replace the question of what the work means with the question of how it affects us.