There’s a probably apocryphal and certainly no longer applicable idea that the colour of your wellington boots determines your class. Lower classes used green wellies, middle class wore black wellies but the true upper crust wore green wellies again.
Regardless of how true that ever was are there any good examples where in general people on oppisite sides of a scale, (not neccesarily social), both generally do the same thing, wheras those in the middle do something different?
The higher levels of political leadership have a tendency toward living in elitist luxury, regardless of their political flavour - I don’t really know which examples to pick as opposites - more than one kind of scale is possible - In the middle, there may be political bodies who are in the game ostensibly to serve something other than their own personal desires.
Still mostly apocryphal, but a similar thing I’ve heard is that poor people drive shitty cars because that’s all they can afford; modestly wealthy splurge on luxury cars; while extremely wealthy people drive shitty cars again because they have no need to flaunt their wealth.
Given the entries on this list, I think there’s probably a tiny element of truth to the story.
A lot of the Soviet leaders had very luxurious villas, and the like.
Sam Walton famously kept on driving an old pickup long after he was wealthy.
Does the bowler hat count? Famously worn by working class Victorians – and upper class bankers. Wiki is unclear on whether these happened contemporaneously. I do remember that documentary Are You Being Served? where the boss asserted his right to a bowler as a manager, which one of his underlings resented because the hat he had to buy was more expensive than a bowler, which perhaps does speak to a double-ended phenomenon in which some people wore them because they were cheap.
Not precisely the same thing, but in language, the middle class is the most conservative about standards, accent, &c. It’s the same thing about the relaxation of standards proving status rather than the attainment thereof. The lower/working class “doesn’t care” aka hasn’t. Been socialized to perceive their own status through language correctness, so it amounts to something similar.