I ceratinly agree with your observation that many so-called progressives pursuing their own agenda, etc. To that, I can only add my own anecdotes, such as that when an anti-Gulf war protest action was planned by progressive activists at the University of Calfornia at Santa Cruz (average student household income $80,000), someone proposed a joint action with the striking workers at a Green Giant plant in the nearby Watsonville. The deafening silence followed, and the 'faux pass' was politely ignored.
Or several months later, when a student association at the same university was asked by a union not to cross picket lines at the local posh resataurant the Coconut Grove and move their graduation party elsewhere, the association reps politely refused. Sure, there were some noisy individuals who called for joining the workers (and actually did form a picket line which their 'progressive' classmates and professors crossed), but they were literally told to grow up, and that the student years (meaning indealistic progressivism) were over, and siding with workers in the 'real' (meaning corporate) world was not a wise choice.
In that light, your statement identifying your own class (presumanbly working) with the blue collar _characters_, such as the rabbit lady from your film Roger & Me (one of the few videos I actually bought instead of pirating, as I do not recognize intellectual property rights, and use it as a didactic device to show my foreign visitors alterantives to Amerika, Inc.). You see, my problem with that approach lies in that it identifies class boundaries by cultural stereotypes (manufatured by the corporate media to a large extent), while ignoring the essential feature of that class - work. Hence people who share the essential feature of the working class - selling their own labour for a living - are artificially divided into two opposing groups, erroneously called classes, that correspond to the high and the low culture.
Your apparent embracement of the 'low culture' values - sardonic humor, poking fun at the elites, populism, etc. only reinforces that faux distinction along cultural stereotypy lines. You see, where I grew up (Europe), the so-called 'elite culture' was far from being ridiculed and rejected by the working class and the left. Instead, the leftists believed that such culture and its products should be available to everyone, including the working class, not just to elites. The European Left did not want to burn down bourgeois chateaus or turn opera houses into bowling alleys -- they merely wanted to open their doors to the working class.
For the European left, the real battle ground was not the realm of culture, but the realm of material resources. They accepted the superior value of the bourgeois culture, but they struggled for the equitable distribution of the material resources. In the US however, the opposite seem to be true. The is little contestation of the grossly unequal distribution of the material resources, the main struggle seem to be concentrated in the area of culture. Specifically, the blue-collar sardonic culture, vs. the white collar elite culture.
Taking the 'sardonic' side in that battle does not overcome the primacy of the cultural over the material in how the American left seems to frame the class issue. And I must concur with Doug that this kind of politics is indeed 'unerdeveloped." It is so, because it diverts the real (material wealth distribution) issues into the quagmire of symbols, abstractions, values, "mirrors and smoke" that serve only one purpose: creating artificial divisions among people sharing common economic interests. Divide et impera.
To summarize: While I agree with your view that there is a rift between 'progressives' and 'blue collar workers' in the US, I also think that such rift is mainly caused by cultural stereotypes. Swaping 'high' and 'low' values over those stereotypes only reinforces them, while obscuring the real issue - gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth and power.
With best regards,
Wojtek Sokolowski