I realize I may get some flack for this, but here goes.

[Think. Again.]

6. I believe you might be wrongly hung up on the "middle class" thing.

The financially-comfortable-but-not-excessively-rich status covers a huge portion of our population, including those that you point out in your post, -retired people (hippy or not) are mostly within the fiscal category of middle class, as are academics.

And AOC did not say "working class", which denotes a much smaller demographic which does exclude some of the groups you mention, but as you post says, she said "middle classv which is strictly a financial category.

As far as "brawler", I believe she just means someone who will fight hard and and long, and certainly not in the physical sense (because the Left doesn't do unnecessary violence).