Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses

“[Aldus] Huxley, a member of the Eugenics Society, saw mass literacy, mass education, and popular newspapers as having “created an immense class [the middle class] of what I may call the New Stupid.” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 107.

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[Susan] “Sontag, who thought of herself as a displaced European suffering among philistine Americans, echoed Randolph Bourne in asserting that “intelligence” was “really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.” And the “new aristocrats of taste” were those led by homosexual men who saw that comic books, popular art, and pornography, viewed with the right spirit of irony and mischief, were an extension of the new sensibility that swap “life as theatre.” In this victory of style over content and aesthetics over morality, Sontag defined the emerging ethos of the 60s. The middlebrow menace was banished to the sidelines.” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 114.