How the death of middlebrow culture led to Trump's barbarism [View all]

How the death of middlebrow culture led to Trump’s barbarism
All the cool people hated middle-class suburban culture — but it looks a lot better compared to what came next

By Mike Lofgren
Contributing Writer
Published April 19, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Those of us of a certain age can remember the middle-class suburban home of the late 1950s and early 1960s. On the coffee table lay a large format book titled “The World’s Most Beautiful Paintings,” or something similar. The bookshelf groaned under the weight of the Encyclopedia Britannica, or perhaps Collier’s Encyclopedia. Alongside it were volumes of the various Book of the Month Club selections. The console where the hi-fi lived might have a Reader’s Digest boxed set of vinyl LPs called “Music of the World’s Greatest Composers” (pressed under contract by RCA), or a Time-Life classical music compilation.

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The terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” derived from the 19th-century pseudoscience of phrenology, and the former was first popularized by a New York Sun reporter around 1902, to be quickly followed by the latter. “Middlebrow” dates to the 1920s, first used by the British humor magazine Punch. Virginia Woolf then got into the act, criticizing the BBC Home Service as middlebrow, despite its newsreaders’ plummy Oxbridge accents. Elsewhere she defined the term as “this mixture of geniality and sentiment stuck together with a sticky slime of calf’s-foot jelly.”

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What would Woolf possibly have made of the spectacle of postwar America? The GI Bill and the industrial boom drove the greatest project of mass education and mass consumption in world history. The huge expansion of universities created millions of graduates eager for cultural experience, along with a better life than they, or any previous generation, had experienced before the war. Equally, the need for professors and instructors engendered by the college boom created its own class of intellectuals and intellectual hangers-on. Some of those eagerly sought to enlighten their charges, while a few others grew to see – or claimed to see – an unbridgeable chasm between the ivory tower and mass cultural aspiration.

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The Vietnam War and the culture wars it spawned drove a stake through the heart of middlebrow culture, as well as the high culture it supported, just as it killed progressivism as a mainstream political movement. Almost the entire intellectual class opposed the war, but many in that class seemed to adopt the non-sequitur that because the war was evil, it was a waste of time to enforce the most minimal cultural standards. Hence the plethora of comic book studies courses at universities today. Or they retreated, following Macdonald’s advice, into social irrelevance by adopting dead-end pseudo-philosophies like deconstructionism. Middlebrow culture slowly died along with the highbrows’ disappearance from public life. ..........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/04/19/how-the-death-of-middlebrow-culture-led-to-trumps-barbarism/