Salon recently published a very strange essay by Mike Lofgren entitled “How the death of middlebrow culture led to Trump’s barbarism.” Now, it’s not strange to speak of the death of middlebrow culture; indeed, historian Steven Mintz wrote a lament for it four years ago for Inside Higher Ed. (Lofgren does not cite Mintz’s essay, which also seems strange.) For those of you unfamiliar with the term, Mintz’s essay is a good place to start—certainly better than Lofgren’s. Mintz offers some good and helpful examples of the infamously nebulous category of the middlebrow: he points, as representative examples, to “the eclecticism of The Ed Sullivan Show, which combined comedy, puppetry and rock ’n’ roll with ballet dancers, classical music performances and operatic sopranos and tenors.” He evokes “the golden age of the American musical,” College Bowl quiz shows, Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, Julia Child’s The French Chef TV series and the Merchant-Ivory cinematic adaptations of classic late-19th- and early-20th-century novels. You know, the sort of things that appeal to ordinary people who are interested in arts and letters and something called “culture,” not academic specialists or professional intellectuals, and which—like today’s TED talks—routinely get derided by academic specialists and professional intellectuals. And the reason they get derided, most often, is that they’re never hip, avant-garde, or generally difficult. Edgebros despise them. Whether that’s an index of their value … well, let me say, in cultural-relativist mode, that your mileage may vary.
I don’t care whether middlebrow culture is actually dead. I also don’t want to quibble over whether this or that thing is middlebrow. The point is that “middlebrow” was always a term of derision; Lofgren is right about that, and right to adduce Dwight Macdonald as a great hater of all things he designated middlebrow. Macdonald’s 1960 book, Masscult and Midcult, is a classic of curmudgeondom, as its slightly batty subtitle indicates: An Inquiry into American Popular Culture and the Role of the Middlebrows in the Distortion of Cultural Value. Macdonald’s lineal descendant is undoubtedly literary edgebro Curtis White; his 2003 book, The Middle Mind, is notable for its ferocious attack on NPR’s Terry Gross, who, as White would have it, is obviously the enemy of true art and history’s greatest monster.
So, there is a well-established genre of agonizing or fulminating about the middlebrow. What’s weird about Lofgren’s essay is the claim that any of this has anything to do with the rise of Donald Trump. The argument, as best I can make it out, can be summed up in this sentence: “Because so many intellectuals failed to uphold their own supposed standards and regarded the inherited legacy of Western culture as an irretrievably flawed embarrassment, the right wing has eagerly filled the vacuum.” As you are surely aware, there are many entries in the competition to blame something for the rise of Donald Trump; my own favorites are Mark Lilla’s claim, in The Once and Future Liberal, that it all has to do with gays and lesbians saying “I’m here, I’m queer” (and yes, he gets the crucial first-person pronoun wrong, and forgets the even more crucial “get used to it” part) or Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem, and the ubiquitous claim that it’s all the fault of the handful of humanities professors who foisted the word “Latinx” on the world. Up until now, learned diagnoses of the rise of Trump have reliably blamed it on people who are not white men and who got too strident or shrill or uppity, thereby alienating people in a diner in Ohio. Blaming the alleged death of middlebrow culture has, at the very least, the charm of novelty.
And then comes a paragraph that cannot be described, only experienced:
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 books studies 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.
OK, at this point I give up. I mean, WTAF? Antiwar intellectuals led to the academic study of comics? On Facebook, I asked whether there was any market for a parody of this kind of thing, and I offered some prompts:
— the rise of craft beers, following Jimmy Carter’s deregulation of homebrewing, led to the expansion of professional sports leagues in the US
— the creation of municipal recycling centers led to the popularity of Crocs
— the advent of child safety caps on medicine and household cleaners led to the phenomenon of helicopter parenting
But then I realized there’s something serious at stake here. A certain cultural phenomenon did indeed lead to a certain political phenomenon, and it involves arguments like Lofgren’s.
Let me take you back to the first round of the academic division of the culture wars, in the “political correctness” moral panic of the early 1990s. The Atlantic had published a 10,000-word excerpt from Dinesh D’Souza’s book, Illiberal Education, that contains the claim that deconstruction “appears uniformly hostile to all texts” but never applies the deconstructive method to texts by women and nonwhite folk. My response at the time was kind of like my response to Lofgren now: “If someone were to publish a claim that Paradise Lost never really talks about theology, or that psychoanalysis fails to make use of the works of major Greek dramatists, certainly we would recognize such a person as a cultural illiterate.”
The problem back then was that bullshit about deconstruction, or about critical theory more generally, wasn’t confined to right-wing trolls like D’Souza. Poet David Lehman, notably, published a whole entire book, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, that contained claims like this: “Deconstructionists would obliterate the differences between Roger Rabbit and Henry James.” Why in the world Lehman went after a virtuoso piece of animation like Roger Rabbit is anyone’s guess, but I suspect that he wasn’t well versed in comics studies. More to the point, Lehman had a very definite idea of what criticism is supposed to do; his larger complaint about deconstruction was that “the function of criticism is reduced to description and analysis; the task of evaluating works of art is left undone. Abandoned is one of criticism’s foremost responsibilities: the making and revising of critical discriminations.”
Now this is a much bigger can of worms. The question of whether interpretation should consist of textual analysis or evaluative judgment is one of the perennial questions of criticism, and you can find strong arguments all over the map. Northrop Frye’s dismissal of evaluative criticism is deservedly famous:
The literary chit-chat which makes the reputation of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange is pseudo-criticism. That wealthy investor Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the market, is now buying him again; Donne has probably reached his peak and will begin to taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight flutter but the Shelley stocks are still bearish.
A generation later, Barbara Herrnstein Smith would reply to this in Contingencies of Value by complaining that “the entire problematic of value and evaluation has been evaded and explicitly exiled by the literary academy.” (You would think that Lehman would second this emotion, but in fact he attacked Smith because she did not believe in “objective” value and made a neo-utilitarian case that all value judgments are contingent on context-specific goals and desires).
And guess what? Somewhere between Frye’s 1957 book and Smith’s 1989 book, standards of academic evaluation in the humanities really did change! Gradually, degraded and even lowbrow cultural forms like “movies” were taken seriously, and before you knew it, something called “cultural studies” started seeping into the groundwater, leading any number of people to take silly comic books like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alan Moore’s Watchmen seriously as well.
Not everyone in the humanities was happy about this. Again, a screed from the early 1990s: William Kerrigan, who had published two books on Milton (from the angle of Jacques Lacan, no less), had an epic midlife crisis and decided to lash out in print: “While I was reading difficult books,” he sputtered, “the new cream-bowl theorists, content with handbook-deep knowledge, went into serious professionalism, jerry-building ‘programs’ and ‘concentrations’ onto the traditional structure of academic majors, setting up ‘institutes’ to secure their unearned self-importance, arranging conferences and starting journals.” Imagine that! Academics did academic things! But somehow all this entailed abandoning all intellectual standards: “People got tenure for writing about the imperialist fantasies of Marvel Comics or the gender rules in Harlequin Romances—ideas that might have made decent articles for High Times but, driven by theory, got seriously out of hand.”
The gratuitous and ignorant swipe at Janice Radway’s groundbreaking Reading the Romance is remarkable enough; one wonders what the late Kerrigan would have made, a few decades later, of Ramzi Fawaz’s terrific first book, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, or José Alaniz’s Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. (I’m just listing the two books I’ve read, and not, say, cultural studies icon Henry Jenkins’s Comics and Stuff or the many other monographs on the subject. But yeah, it’s an actual academic field and has been for quite some time.)
My point is not merely that Lofgren’s complaint about “comic books studies” passed its sell-by date roughly around the time Bill Clinton took office. Instead, I want to argue—because this argument is right and just—that bullshit about deconstruction and comics and academe from the early 1990s paved the way for Jordan Peterson’s miasmic hallucinations about something he calls “cultural Marxism,” which in turn paved the way for Christopher Rufo’s wildly successful campaign to make shit up about stuff and attribute it to Critical Race Theory. (For what it’s worth, Rufo has been refreshingly honest about his profoundly dishonest campaign: “the goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” Or, as Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson sing in “My Medicine,” “You can trust every word I’m gonna tell you is a lie.”)
And so here we are, in a world where Plato is banned from college courses in philosophy and knuckle-dragging twentysomethings tear through the federal government cancelling grants by using ChatGPT to search for telltale keywords like “diverse.” (Among the more notable casualties was a $349,000 grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina—because AI flagged this suspect rationale: “Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences.” Cultural Marxism at work, no doubt. For DOGE, HVAC is the new DEI.)
Spewing arrant nonsense about the past century or so of work in the humanities has real-world consequences: who knew? Back when Allan Bloom was ranting about Mick Jagger, it was kind of cute. But in the Peterson-Rufo Era, maybe it would be a good idea to insist that people who go on about deconstruction and cultural Marxism and comics studies and whateverthehellelse should actually do the work, read the books, and have some basic idea of what they’re talking about. You know, so that we can all observe some cultural standards, and chase the charlatans and grifters from the public square.
Which brings me to the last weird thing about Lofgren’s essay: he comes to the same conclusion.
The very concepts of intellectualism, and of objective knowledge itself, have been debased by a kind of Gresham’s Law, with the bad driving out the good. Thanks to backing by billionaires like Marc Andreessen, the Mercer family, or Peter Thiel (who has a whole stable of paid propagandists) it’s easy for any right winger with an itch to see his name in print to achieve publication. The mainstream media, in turn, is in the habit of headlining such scriveners as “intellectuals,” never mind that these publicists for gangsterism bear as much resemblance to genuine intellectuals as Mad Dog 20/20 does to Château Lafite Rothschild.
All quite true! But if you’re going to make that case, you shouldn’t complain that antiwar intellectuals stopped enforcing the most minimal cultural standards and now people study comics. It’s kind of self-undermining.
Banner image is from Mark Tansey’s 1984 “The Triumph of the New York School.”
