middlebrow culture – A postwar cultural shift from shared middlebrow aspiration toward contempt and spectacle helped clear the ground for today’s harsh, image-first U.S. politics—an argument Misryoum explores.
The United States has always produced political styles as much as it produces policy. Misryoum’s latest analysis connects a cultural change many Americans stopped talking about—middlebrow culture—to the harder, more theatrical politics now associated with Donald Trump.
For readers who came of age after World War II, the “middlebrow” world wasn’t only about taste.. It was about belonging.. In many suburban homes. culture lived visibly in the ordinary: encyclopedias on the shelf. large-format art books on a coffee table. magazines and classical recordings near the living-room television.. The point wasn’t necessarily that everyone used those books or listened with the intensity critics imagined.. The deeper impulse was social—wanting to be seen as someone who cared. someone who could step toward “high” culture even if it didn’t come naturally.
Misryoum sees a crucial tension underneath that era’s confidence.. The mid-century middle class expanded access to education through programs like the GI Bill. and universities grew quickly enough to create an entire cohort of people hungry for cultural experience.. Yet intellectual elites often treated that same aspiration with suspicion or scorn.. The “middlebrow” became a target—mocked as performative, watered down, and insufficiently pure.. Virginia Woolf. for instance. may be celebrated for her feminism. but Misryoum notes that her private attitudes were sharper and more class-bound than her public cultural position suggests.
That hostility shaped what came next.. The postwar decades didn’t just create new consumers of culture; they also created new gatekeepers of cultural legitimacy—reviewers. professors. and critics who insisted there was a correct hierarchy of art and ideas.. Dwight Macdonald. a prominent critic in the mid-20th-century American cultural debate. argued that mass culture was not merely mediocre but somehow incapable of reaching real artistic standards.. He then turned on “midcult. ” describing it as a kind of disguise: popular forms that borrowed the manners of high culture without delivering its substance.. In his view, the danger was the pretense.
Misryoum’s focus isn’t on whether Macdonald’s cultural judgments were right.. It’s on what his prescription did to the social role of educated people.. If intellectuals retreat—if they stop engaging the broader public and treat participation itself as contamination—then the cultural center weakens.. Misryoum argues that the cultural “buffer” once created by middlebrow engagement—by people who loved some things. struggled with others. and kept showing up—gradually thinned out.. The result wasn’t simply a change in what Americans consumed.. It became a change in what Americans believed they were entitled to expect from one another.
Then came the political shocks that turned cultural conflict into a broader social fracture.. Misryoum notes the Vietnam War’s influence in accelerating cultural disengagement and intensifying “culture war” thinking.. When the moral energy of the antiwar movement collided with the idea that enforcing even basic standards was futile. educational and cultural institutions didn’t just debate art—they debated seriousness.. Over time, that environment helped make public life easier to dismiss and harder to unify around shared expectations.
Misryoum also sees a parallel pattern inside today’s politics: contempt as a political resource.. Where earlier political leadership often tried to preserve a sense of institutional seriousness—even if one disagreed with it—Trump-era style thrives on spectacle. provocation. and a refusal to treat norms as stable.. The modern political performance doesn’t merely appeal to voters; it trains audiences to interpret seriousness as weakness and criticism as persecution.. In that atmosphere. the middlebrow impulse—trying to meet standards. learning in public. stretching toward something better—doesn’t just lose cultural status.. It loses political usefulness.
The article’s deepest warning is not just that popular culture changed. but that the cultural vocabulary that supported civic life eroded.. Misryoum points to the way public debate can increasingly reward people who trade in certainty without knowledge. references without comprehension. and rhetoric without accountability.. When “objective knowledge” becomes a political costume and reference points fade. public arguments shift away from policies and toward identity theater.. That. in turn. makes it easier for demagogic messaging to feel like a defense of “real America” rather than an assault on shared standards.
This helps explain why the loss of middlebrow culture matters for U.S.. governance.. The institutions of American politics—Congress. the courts. the executive branch. state legislatures—operate on processes that require public trust in rules.. Education, cultural habits, and civic literacy are part of that trust, even when politics pretends otherwise.. Misryoum’s editorial stance is that when people stop expecting one another to read. to verify. or to treat expertise as more than a prop. politics becomes less deliberative by design.
There’s also a future-facing implication.. Misryoum doesn’t assume cultural polarization is irreversible.. But reversing it likely requires more than nostalgia for the 1950s.. It requires rebuilding bridges between “high” standards and everyday participation—creating spaces where learning isn’t mocked. where aspiration isn’t treated as embarrassment. and where public disagreements don’t immediately become moral warfare.. If the middlebrow once functioned as a social buffer. Misryoum suggests the replacement has to be deliberate: not an elite reset. but a mass civic re-engagement that makes seriousness feel possible again.
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