This j"accuse might be of interest to you.
I read David R. Slavitt's Blue State Blues: How a Cranky Conservative Launched a Campaign And Found Himself the Liberal Candidate (And Still Lost) at about the same time. It's interesting for the RINO threads as well.
The two books made an interesting pair. Douthat's a party-line movement-type conservative, but couldn't quite bring himself to fully support Harvard against labor protesters. There didn't seem to be any real question of principle involved, just Harvard making more money. Slavitt, a very liberal Republican on social issues, was all for tax-exempt Harvard against Cambridge politicians, just as he was for the classes against the masses on social issues. Of the two points of view, I agree more with Douthat and his ambivalence. Slavitt harkens back to all the vices of Northeastern Rockefeller or Lindsay Republicanism.
Populism and elitism are a little stale now. Thirty years ago, if you were from an ordinary suburb or neighborhood of Boston or New York or Philadelphia, you didn't want the university liberals and their upper class allies running things, so you voted against them. Probably you still don't like them and still vote against them.
Nowadays, though, sectional divisions are more pronounced in politics. "Populist" messages reflect more the opposition of South and West to the two coasts, so it's harder to get behind "populism" if you don't live in the base or target areas. Sometimes you do meet a real hardcore elitist and have something to react against, but most of the time what's going on is a struggle for power between regions that doesn't easily fit into elitist vs. populist categories.
I've no doubt that Lasch was right enough in his own time, but the categories may have outlived their relevance to what's really going on. A lot of the time, elitism and populism are just the emotional coloring that we give to "them" vs. "us" conflicts.