middle class revisited

The Right's culture warriors did not openly attack the economic position of the middle class, but they did attach the university. In doing so, they created the conditions for repeated budget cuts to the core middle-class institution [i.e. university]. More fundamentally, they discredited the cultural conditions of mass-middle-class development, downsized the influence of its leading institution, the university, and reduced the social and political impacts of knowledge workers overall. (italic original. p. 11)

The middle class as an emerging anti-conservative bloc (p. 46):

Domain	Challenge	Middle-class bulwark	Emerging nonconservative middle class
Politics	Multiracial mass democracy	Expert rule; no power sharing	Majoritarian democracy; antielitism
Economy	Decline of profits, labor conditions	Market, growth, consumption, deregulation	Planned mixed economy; mass affluence; human needs
Culture	Qualitative, context-specific, cross-cultural knowledge	White supremacism; "cultural deficiency" of other groups	Cultural and social equality; self-development; liberation

Christopher Newfield's Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).