An Example: Turning common ground into progressive messages.

“Civilian life is nothing,” spits fictional Vietnam vet, John Rambo, in Sylvester Stallone’s 1977 “First Blood.” Facing hundreds of police and recurring nightmares, Rambo tells his former commander how, since leaving the army, he’d felt isolated and abandoned by the country he once served.

“In the field,” he accuses, “we had a code of honor. You watch my back, I watch yours. Back here there's nothing!”

That Nothing is what movement conservatives are selling.

It is time we said so.

Conservatives make a great show of supporting our men and women in uniform, holding them up as exemplifying America's highest ideals of service, sacrifice, selflessness, and a code of honor. (Google “never [1] leave [2] a [3] Marine [4] behind [5]” for a sampling.) We tell ourselves Americans will risk blood and treasure to save a single countryman at risk. That kind of all-for-oneness in films like “Behind Enemy Lines [6]” makes our hearts swell.

Especially movement conservative hearts – until you're discharged. Then their message flip-flops. Now it’s every man for himself. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Don't expect any help from me.

For movement conservatism, “leave no man behind” represents America at its best – inside the base front gate. Step through it into the civilian world, and it’s subversive, creeping socialism.

No wonder Rambo had a hard time adjusting.

If “leave no man behind” is America at its best, what does “every man for himself” represent?

Why shouldn’t those same high ideals and principles that tax dollars instill in our military inform public policymaking as well? Why are they good enough for our troops, but not the rest of us?

No American Left Behind is a progressive message – we are all in this together. In an age of political divisiveness in which medicine is a luxury, home foreclosures are setting records and American jobs continue to bleed away, it speaks on a gut-level to people’s ideals of how America at its best ought to work: for everyone.

From experience, conservatives find No American Left Behind unsettling. They become defensive. Because liberals aren’t supposed to be able to challenge them on their turf. Because their objections about the proper role of government clang wonky and hollow. Because their insistence that government breeds weakness sounds laughable. (Tell it to a Marine.) Because it exposes the emptiness of movement conservatism. And especially, because for liberals to pose the question is for liberals to win voters’ hearts and minds.

That is most the unsettling thing of all.

The practical problem for Democrats, liberals and progressives prone to long-windedness is how to convey their message to independents and swing voters in a sound bite. The Right mastered that art long ago. The Left is still learning.

The message must be short, pithy, and built around familiar visual images, themes and cultural references voters already recognize.

We begin not by attacking conservative memes voters may already believe. Instead, embrace them – a kind of political aikido – then expand upon them. Identify points of universal agreement. Use common ground as the foundation for promoting a more progressive worldview. A view they share with us, and maybe didn’t know it.

That’s leadership. Meet people where they are, and lead them to where we are.

Based on No American Left Behind, here is an example delivered in under 30 seconds (text and audio [7]).

The message advocates no programs or policies. It promotes a progressive idea. Programs and policies grow out of ideas. That’s the point: planting them so they can take root.

The most forceful pushback on No American Left Behind has come from veterans, taking some form of, "Marine – Always earned, never given." Common citizens should first have to exhibit “personal responsibility” (conservative code-speak we can unpack another day). One vet stated bluntly that the military’s “elite groups” are entitled to privileged treatment above people who are Americans merely by “accident of birth.”

So put this scenario to critics: You are a squad leader. You and your team have been ordered to take a building and extract a group of American civilians under fire – putting your lives at risk for your fellow countrymen. I know you don’t mean that, upon arrival, you would vet each person to ensure (by some subjective measure) that they are real Americans worthy of not being left behind. I know you don't mean that. What do you mean?