Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

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

Published April 19, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)

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.

Did everyone routinely use the encyclopedia, or read the Steinbeck novel, or listen attentively to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony? That is uncertain, but what it showed was the cultural aspiration of the post-World War II American middle class: People wanted to be seen as interested in those things, whatever their actual level of enthusiasm. The era is often thought of in retrospect as the waning days of the McCarthy era and a time of drab conformity — think William H. Whyte’s “The Organization Man” or David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” or even, retrospectively, “Mad Men” – but there was a flip side to the period: It was the high point of middlebrow culture.

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.”

One can readily sense the intellectual hostility to middlebrow culture, which in England dated back before the existence of a large and prosperous middle class with a hunger for culture. As for Woolf, her status as a feminist heroine may be somewhat dimmed by the fact that she was a terrific snob. While from time to time, like Matthew Arnold a century before, she professed to see some virtue in the lower classes, she reserved most........

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