Posted on 08/05/2007 4:54:00 AM PDT by Tree of Liberty
The netroots is reveling in Chicago, and the natural reaction is to ask, “Where’s our YearlyKos?”
It’s a good question, but ultimately a short-sighted one from an historical perspective. Go back and re-read the TNR piece on the netroots from May. Especially this part:
The Democratic leadership and the liberal intelligentsia seemed pathetic and exhausted, wedded to musty ideals of bipartisanship and decorousness. Meanwhile, what the netroots saw in the Republican Party, they largely admired. They saw a genuine mass movement built up over several decades. They saw a powerful message machine. And they saw a political elite bound together with ironclad party discipline.
This, they decided, is what the Democratic Party needed. And, when they saw that the party leadership was incapable of creating it, they decided to do it themselves. “We are at the beginning of a comprehensive reformation of the Democratic Party,” write Moulitsas and Armstrong.
Who is jealous of who here? YearlyKos, and also the Take Back America Conference, were almost certainly borne of the question “Where is our CPAC?” Some of those covering this act as though the idea of a conference with thousands of grassroots activists and Presidential candidates falling all over themselves to speak is totally unheard of on the right. Um, no. The netroots was built on Xeroxing the Goldwater-Reagan Revolution in the Republican Party. Almost always, it was conservatives who were the initial innovators.
When covering the netroots vs. the rightroots, reporters look at things through a particular frame that by definition excludes the vast majority of grassroots activity on the right. For something to be newsworthy in this space, it must be blog-based, it must have emerged in the last five years, and it must be focused on elections over legislative or policy outcomes.
The problem with this angle is that most of the conservative institutions online emerged in the late Clinton Administration or immediately after 9/11. At their peak, they were larger than Daily Kos, and arguably some still are. And they rarely receive any scrutiny because they don’t fit the frame. From a macro movement-building perspective, the left catching us to us is being covered as a need for us to catch up with something the left has invented anew.
And despite how unfair that narrative is, there’s something to it. The conservative analog to YearlyKos is 30 years old. The 800lb. gorillas of the conservative Web initially went online in the 1995-97 timeframe. And many have failed to innovate. They are still Web 1.0, where the Left jumped directly into Web 2.0 in the Bush years. Consider:
But Free Republic simply could not succeed in the world of the blogosphere, social media, and Web 2.0. The founders made the decision that they were going to hoard as much traffic on their servers as possible, by posting full-text articles (that eventually got them slapped with high-profile lawsuits from WaPo and the LAT). Early on, links to blogs were verboten. If you expressed your own opinion when starting a thread, that was a “vanity” and it was frowned upon. And fundraising for candidates was strictly forbidden, except for those pet causes approved by Jim Robinson. Their culture was very anti-blog and anti-original content.
Today, Free Republic increasingly finds itself marginalized. If you support Rudy Giuliani, who still has a decent shot at being our nominee, you’ve probably been purged. Free Republic’s walled garden approach worked in the days before blogs and broadband, but they actively resisted changing with the times. What we now have is a resource with more unique eyeballs than Kos but one that won’t work with others or push the envelope technologically. What a waste. Imagine how the history of the rightroots could have been different if Free Republic wasn’t still stuck in 1996?
What lessons did our activists learn from this? Freepers, who were our best online activists, never learned how to swarm to other sites, to take different kinds of actions, and to raise money for conservative candidates.
Unfortunately, that poses structural challenges that has starved the center-right of tech-savvy volunteers. Of all the issues to choose to make an impact on, the $400 billion-a-year defense apparatus is probably the most impenetrable. (Personally, I would hope that the Pentagon is not reading the blogs to decide their battleplan.) So on the war, we are pretty much limited to punditry, with the obvious exceptions of the milbloggers in the field.
And the media focus also fits the frame of conservative bloggers as pundits rather than activists. If we act as pseudo-journalists and commentators, it stands to reason that we’d think actually getting involved on a campaign is dirty business.
My co-blogger Hugh Hewitt refers to the “lead pipes” of the left-wing blogosphere that are slowly but surely contaminating the groundwater in the Democratic Party. But if their pipes are dirty, ours are leaky and badly in need of an overhaul. (At least if one wants to do more than just pass along positive information about the war.)
It would be one thing if we didn’t have any of these institutions, and could start from scratch just as the netroots did. My fear is that we have a bunch of institutions that still function somewhat well, but are long past their prime. With that, there is the danger we will slowly die without knowing it, as our techniques gradually lose effectiveness year after year. Just like newspaper circulation numbers. And there are a number of people on the right who are still complacent about this.
It seems to me that the numbers are there to do something great around the 2008 elections, and that all we need to do is effectively tap into the conservative blogosphere. I looked at N.Z. Bear’s traffic stats for political blogs with over 20,000 visits a day. And the visitor gap between left and right was lower than I could remember in some time: 1.2 million to 870,000 for the left (half of the left’s total was Kos).
Looking beyond the blogosphere, a place the MSM isn’t as familiar with, and you’ll see that the conservative Web is larger than the liberal Web. Sites like Townhall, WorldNetDaily, and Free Republic have monthly audiences that regularly beat Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, to say nothing of Drudge, which still reigns supreme.
So the people are there, just as they’ve always been. My concern with some of the sites I discussed above is that for ten long years, they haven’t been giving our people Web experiences that teach them how to be more than simple readers.
I agree. We don't get the thoughtful analysis and discussions that we used too. We did a poor job of educating new members on how to use this forum.
As soon as an article is posted we now get 50 to 100 posts that mostly say the same thing. There is a rush to post something witty or a recycled graphic. Many don't bother to read the full article, that has become worse now that almost everything is excerpted.
I gravitate towards threads dealing with science, technology, economics and the military. Some of the people that browse-in and start spouting uninformed opinions are down-right stupid.
The silent majority in the Rat Party are citizens that love a government supplying benefits/handouts. They are basically apolitical, IMO.
The silent majority in the GOP Party are God-Fearing Americans with personal goals and an appreciation of a "get off your ass" attitude.
That's the basic difference.
Outstanding ! ROTFLMAO
Thank you.
What leadership? Far and away the smartest we have is Newt, but everyone worries that every once in a while he will have a brain seizure and do something really dumb. It doesn't detract from what he says when he is being smart, but it does raise the question of his capability to be president 24/7.
To some extent, the set of conservative sites on the Net can serve as a "shadow RNC", and to an extent supplant it (which has the elites worried).
What is the RNC at its essence? It is an organization which sets the tone of what the Republican party as a whole should be, and enforces its position by its ability to grant or withhold support, recognition, and soft money funding to individual candidates
Well, what is FR doing? We let people know about the strengths and weaknesses of candidates, and allow people to make informed judgments on who to send their money to. The net result is to diminish the power of the RNC (and the elites that control it) over the party. If a candidate, detested by the elites for his positions, can secure campaign funding without support from the elites, then that strips the elites of power.
The solution to elite control is to never send money to the RNC. Always send money to individual candidates that you admire. And mention in the letter that you made your decision to send money from what you heard about them on FR
It was by accident and I had the time of my life.
You:
I viewed their point as a call to engage in real conversation and debate, rather than come up with one line rebuttels that add nothing.”
Cannoneer No. 4:
“The IQ level here has dropped precipitiously since I joined. Lots of highly intelligent, articulate, engaging Freepers don’t come here much any more.”
ME:
Cannoneer spelled precipitously wrong, while telling us how
dim witted we are.
He added nothing to the context of the thread.
Cannoneer: "Lots of highly intelligent, articulate, engaging Freepers don't come here much any more. They have moved on"
They probably moved on in their brand new white motorhomes.
No one comes here anymore, it’s too crowded.
Thanks!
You are illustrating our points well. Why don't you troll-off and post pithy, one-liners elsewhere, Newbie.
(I know that you won't, I'm just feeding the troll.)
But it's not the only game in town any more. There's littlegreenfootballs.com, jihadwatch.com, bellmontclub.com, and many others where I spend time in addition to FR
FR hasn’t done some of these things such as swarming because of a conscious decision to behave according to a conservative ethical code.
Trying to tell Freepers what to do is like the proverbial attempt to herd kittens. But when Freepers reach concensus, they move as one to accomplish the task. And then, leaders arise to assist, like Kristinn and Dr. Raoul!
"There are no coincidences." - George Noory
What a silly article.
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