Middle Class or "Middlebrow" - doomed either way?

In the Sunday Arts section of the New York Times On August 3, film critic A.O. Scott applied some amusing cultural history to the current state of social inequality in "The Squeeze on the Middlebrow." It's an informative and thought-provoking piece. He winds pop economist Thomas Picketty's views with those of pop sociologist Russell Lynes who in 1949 concluded "The highbrows would like to eliminate the middlebrows....and devise... a feudal system...in which the lowbrows do the work..."  Sound familiar?