I think I might be, in fact I know I am, a middlebrow.  I just learned that term from Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason.   I find it mildly insulting.   

The word middlebrow was coined by Virginia Woolf - here is the lowdown:

Virginia Woolf on Middlebrow

Virginia Woolf explicitly articulated her derision of the middlebrow in an un-posted letter-to-the-editor of the New Statesman about a review of a book of hers that omitted the word highbrow. That letter was posthumously published in the essay collection The Death of the Moth in 1942.^[2]

Virginia Woolf distinguishes middlebrows as petty purveyors of highbrow cultures for their own shallow benefit. Rather than selecting books for their intrinsic value, middlebrows select and read what they are told is best. Middlebrows are concerned with how what they do makes them appear, unlike highbrows, the avant-garde men and women who act according to their indelible commitment to beauty, value, art, form, and integrity. Woolf said, “We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like”. Likewise, a lowbrow is devoted to a singular interest, a person “of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life”; and, therefore, are equally worthy of reverence, as they, too, are living for what they intrinsically know as valuable.

Middlebrows, instead, are “betwixt and between”, which Woolf classifies as “in pursuit of no single object, neither Art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige”. Their value system rewards quick gains through literature already designated as ‘Classic’ and ‘Great’, never of their own choosing, because “to buy living art requires living taste”. The middlebrow are meretricious — which is much less demanding than authenticity.

It is noteworthy that while Woolf criticizes those members of the middlebrow, she wrote for middlebrow publications, such as The New York Herald Tribune Books section. Her literature has been classified as middlebrow, easily-accessible, and feminized — the very threat she claimed would provoke her to “take pen and stab him, dead” for such a label. Middlebrow audiences finance the works of the highbrow, and most artists must appeal to the wide audience for success...

Getting back to the Jacoby book, she obviously considers herself to be a highbrow.   She has the same ideas as Ayn Rand, that only intellectuals are capable of ruling the world.  

Jacoby has set out to prove that America's demise is due to past anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism movements brought on by fundamentalist religion, a fear of too much education, and today by the influence of infotainment (I wonder if this includes blogging) and sound bites.

Anyway, I will continue slogging through this book.