Let me offer a defense of the meme, because I think you've got the causality backwards. I think that because I'm of an age where, had I gone straight to university after high school, I'd have graduated straight into the teeth of the 2008 recession. So I know how my cohort thinks about plight of the middle class. And almost everyone my age or younger, given a chance to think about it, agrees that the middle class cannot be saved. It's considered a lost cause, and among those who do believe it can be saved, their arguments amount to a blinking confusion and insistence that it must.

Given that people like me have only ever participated in the economy during a time when the middle class was shrinking, what are we to do? Most of us agree, if our future is a world of a few 'haves' and many 'have nots', priority one is to become a 'have'. Even from the most moral stance imaginable, a 'have not' has no ability to help others. Hence, too many of us try to get into the elite. To aim for the middle class is to aim for grinding poverty, and why would anyone?

That's an interesting thought, I'm not sure I agree but I'd have to think about it more to differ.

I don't see that in the "elite overproduction" framework. I see a bunch of desperate kids trying to stay in the middle class that their parents supposedly were in. You need an increased level of specialization to stand still.