Re: Democrats Must Abandon the War on Terror (MyDD)

Chris -

You are absolutely right [see Democrats Must Abandon the War on Terror].

Those who would reframe as a "war" on anything else are missing the point: "war" on anything reinforces the "conservative" frame based on authoritarian, disciplinarian, unilateral behaviours.  "War" invokes exceptionalism, which is why Americans have accepted loss of rights and torture of captured people in various violations of our Constitution.

I disagree [with those who say] that it is too late to reframe the topic.  While it would have been better to do so at the beginning, fundamentally one of the reasons the conservatives framed it the way they did is to create an effectively permanent war situation, since such a "war" is not winnable, which keeps us in their frame permanently.  But because we it won't go away, we have to begin the long, hard work of reframing now to have a shot at undermining its false pretences before the next election.

At the highest level, Kerry's theme was "Stronger at Home, Respected Abroad" to get at part of the this National Security Issue (reframe to "Respected Abroad"), and as someone else reminded us, Kerry himself generally avoided the "war" word.  Furthermore, consistent with Lakoff's recommendation to point out that the Iraq war has WEAKENED America, he emphasized "wrong war, wrong time" and the fact that the $200B could have been spent in America on things like securing our ports and loose nukes around the world.  So Kerry, more than most of the Democrats and progressives, understood the framing problem and was constructing alternatives.

But reframing in the few months of the presidential campaign can be tough when there was no democratic and progressive concerted effort to change the frame [see also It's National Security, Stupid].  We have to do that now for the next election cycles.

The big challenge, as someone else also pointed out, is what is our re-framing device?

I think that one of the progressive community failures in this area is that most groups say national security is job one, but then list it as the fourth or fifth thing in six or seven topic areas.  It has to come FIRST because without it, you can't move to the rest.  Whether we agree or not among ourselves as to the level of threat, the American perception is that it is high and therefore we have to address it first and forcefully or we can't move on.

[For the rest see my comment.]