Mustering all the serenity and self-restraint that has made it famous, the Daily Mail published a full-page editorial on Wednesday headlined “Whingeing. Contemptuous. Unpatriotic. Damn the Bremoaners and their plot to subvert the will of the British people.” It attacked remain voters for being “sore losers” who were “incredulous that the British people could be so disrespectful as to reject their wisdom”. One group in particular attracted the Mail’s contempt: the “metropolitan elite”, defined by the paper as “the well-heeled group of London ‘intellectuals’ which is used to having everything its own way” – and which was anxious to revenge Theresa May’s “devastating attack” on its sneering attitude to public concerns about mass immigration. The Mail identified the BBC as Bremoaner-in-chief.

The paper loves May. Not since Margaret Thatcher has it given a prime minister such unstinting admiration and support. It never much cared for David Cameron – for a time even Gordon Brown ranked higher in the Mail’s affections, perhaps because Brown replaced a flashy predecessor, just as May has done. Both leaders exemplify the hard work and modesty that you might expect from a childhood spent in a churchy household – a manse in Brown’s case and a vicarage in May’s – which are habits and virtues that the Mail likes to think its readers share. May, presumably, loves the Mail in return; who wouldn’t want the support of the most politically influential paper in England? But whether May hates the “metropolitan elite” quite as much as the Mail does is an open question.

On the morning of her big speech to the Tory conference, the Mail’s front-page report predicted that she would condemn this elite, which it also called the “liberal elite”, “for sneering at millions of ordinary Britons over immigration”. But her speech, when she delivered it, wasn’t quite so straightforward. Many politicians and commentators, she told her audience, had found “your patriotism distasteful, your concerns about immigration parochial, your views about crime illiberal, your attachment to your job security inconvenient”. But the only mention of an elite came in an earlier passage about the many “people in positions of power” who behaved as if they had “more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass in the street”. And then she added: “But if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.”

In one or two paragraphs, she had taken aim at various kinds of elites and allegedly elitist attitudes, some antithetical to others and the most awkward of them probably invented for the sake of political balance – for which politician or commentator has ever openly complained about the “inconvenience” of a worker’s attachment to job security?

Two broad categories had been conflated and confused. First came the rich and greedy international elite, who ran businesses that didn’t pay proper taxes and treated their workers badly. Second came a social and cultural elite who peered down their noses at the illiberalism and flag-waving of the classes below.

Both groups could be smeared as citizens of nowhere – “rootless cosmopolitans” in the antisemitic jibe of Stalin’s Soviet Union – but other than that they have little or nothing in common. Ruthless billionaires on the one hand, condescending academics on the other: together, May implied, they had alienated the larger part of an electorate that felt wronged and ignored.

There’s nothing new in her diagnosis. Shortly before he died in 1994, the American historian and moralist Christopher Lasch wrote an eloquent charge sheet against similar targets in his posthumously published book The Revolt of the Elites. He mainly described the United States, but his analysis illuminates many other parts of the world (including the land of Brexit) as well.

What went wrong? Lasch: “The general course of recent history no longer favours the levelling of social distinctions but runs more and more in the direction of a two-class society.” What he called the “democratisation of abundance” – the expectation that each generation would be better off than its predecessor – was giving way to a society of rising inequalities.

How did this happen? When the idea that the masses were riding the wave of history faded away. The radical movements of the 20th century have failed, and the industrial working class, once the mainstay of the socialist movement, has been weakened to the point where, in some of its former strongholds, it barely exists anymore.

Who are the elites? “Those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate.”

A Marxist could have written those last words; the Daily Mail, in its anti-Philip (“Sir Shifty”) Green and anti-metropolitan moments, could almost have written it.

As a social critic rather than an ideologue, Lasch is hard to place on the left-right spectrum. Sometimes he might be depicting the present-day dilemma of a constituency Labour party in the north of England, as when he points out that the class once regarded as the most likely to support a revolution has many members with political instincts more conservative than those of their radical would-be leaders.

Elsewhere he could be describing a way of London living that in 1994 still lay a dozen years in the future: “Ambitious people understand … that a migratory way of life is the price of getting ahead … ‘multiculturalism’ suits them to perfection, conjuring up an agreeable image of a global bazaar … Theirs is essentially a tourist’s view of the world.”

The Daily Mail’s portrayal of remainers as truculent and bitter has a few grains of truth

Reading Lasch at this time of crisis in British history is also valuable as a caution. He writes that when the common folk confront well-meaning initiatives from above, their resistance provokes an outburst of “the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence”.

I don’t think of myself as upper-middle-class, but that might be a caricature of my emotions when, say, I watch Brexiteers on Question Time. The Daily Mail’s portrayal of remainers as truculent and bitter has a few grains of truth. Nobody can look at something they see as a catastrophe and not despair of the people who caused it.

Speaking of whom, let us count the public schools and the frequent mention of the same university. Nigel Farage (Dulwich College), Daniel Hannan (Marlborough and Oxford), Douglas Carswell (Charterhouse and UEA), Mark Reckless (Charterhouse and Oxford), David Cameron (Eton and Oxford), George Osborne (St Paul’s and Oxford), Boris Johnson (Eton and Oxford), Michael Gove (Robert Gordon’s College and Oxford), John Redwood (Kent College, Canterbury and Oxford), Bill Cash (Stonyhurst and Oxford), Matthew Elliott (Leeds Grammar and LSE), Dominic Cummings (Durham School and Oxford).

That looks like an elite to me. More than that – it looks like a ruling class. In its whiteness, maleness and connectedness it could have ruled Britain in 1955. I imagine its members not as a caricature but as an old-fashioned cartoon: boys in school caps and short trousers lighting a little firework labelled “Sovereignty” next to a huge pile of tinder marked “All Our Discontents”. As Terry-Thomas used to exclaim in the films of those days: “What a shower! What an absolute shower!”