Plus ca Change

The present state of American politics, in which a powerful elite cultivates the resentments of the lower moral classes--gays, trannies, minorities, anyone with a grudge against normality--to wage war on the hated middle class, what Steve Sailer calls the "high/low against the middle", is a dangerous perversion of a practice nearly as old as the emergence of the bourgeois as an alternative.

The elite takes allies wherever it finds them. American democracy has so perverted things that it now finds them among the disaffected and alienated. This is altogether new.
Middle class power is democracy channeled through material and communal interest. Our current individualistic populism,"people power" in the old sixties phrase, is democracy channeled through individual ambitions, desires and resentments.
But the durability of the triad--like so many things, a trinity--of two classes combining against one is striking.

From Manners, Customs and Dress of the Middle Ages by Paul Lacroix:

In no case could a community [civic bodies of middle class citizens] such as this exist without the sanction of the King, who placed it under the safeguard of the Crown. At first the kings, blinded by a covetous policy, only seemed to see in the issue of these charters an excellent pretext for extorting money. If they consented to recognize them, and even to help them against their lords, it was on account of the enormous sacrifices made by the towns. Later on, however, they affected, on the contrary, the greatest generosity towards the vassals who wished to incorporate themselves, when they had understood that these institutions might become powerful auxiliaries against the great titular feudalists; but from the reign of Louis XI., when the power of the nobles was much diminished, the kings turned against their former allies, the middle classes, and deprived them successively of all the prerogatives which could prejudice the rights of the Crown.