I'm not very well read in the area of cultural studies, but a book group I'm in just read Stewart Hall's The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (out of print, sorry)-- which is an a collection of very insightful essays that I found as relevant and insightful to today's America as they must have been to Thatcher's England.

Comparisons with Thomas Frank immediately come to mind, except Frank (who writes similarly about authoritarian populism, but decades later) is sometimes less precise in his analysis, actually (although I find him to be a much better writer). Look for an upcoming comparative essay by Michael Berube, who has many insights on Hall and teaches cultural studies.