"As Much a Testament to the Exalted Claims Made for Culture in Midcentury America as It Is a Casualty of What Has Happened Since"

"These days, it’s hard to recognize that America. The wage stagnation that began in the late ’70s has since bestowed on us the kind of income inequality more typical of a third-world oligarchy. The real minimum wage is less than it was in 1968, and the richest 1 percent of Americans take home nearly 25 percent of the country’s income, as compared with the 9 percent they earned in 1974. All of which gives Macdonald’s complaint the feel of a time capsule, one that contains no foreshadowing of how quickly and completely everything would change. Macdonald failed to anticipate what would happen not only to art but also to its audience. The middlebrow flourished because the middle class was flourishing: this much he got right. Yet he wrote as if the middle class would necessarily continue to prosper, as if the profusion of 'money, leisure, and knowledge' could be taken for granted, when in fact he was bemoaning the cultural fallout from the Great Prosperity in the last days before its demise. Middlebrowism is still with us, of course, but its growth required a middle class that was upwardly mobile as well as a link, whether real or perceived, between culture and status. Macdonald’s Midcult shit list—which includes the likes of Saturday Review, The Reporter and the Book-of-the-Month Club—is a catalog of species that are either endangered or extinct."

Jennifer Szalai in The Nation revisits Dwight Macdonald's "Masscult and Midcult" in post-middle class America.