Revolt of the Elites

Christopher Lasch's 1994 posthumously published argument that the American elite has abandoned the virtues of middle-class democracy — cosmopolitan, mobile, credentialed, and contemptuous of provincial working-class culture — inverting the concern about a revolt of the masses by pointing to the elite's abandonment of democratic norms.

Creates the framework for understanding elite-working class cultural divergence — Revolt of the Elites inverts Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses to argue that it is the educated upper-middle class that has abandoned democratic norms (local attachment, civic participation, deferred gratification) while the masses retain them.