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.
A fair number of the "purged" people spent years chasing off folks they disagreed with - most often, on immigration-related matters.
So they got hoisted on their own petards.
Actually, I think hhc's point is that some of the same people who could be described by the moniker of 'Rudybot', tended to be, IMHO, vile and abusive posters (wonder if there's any 'howling' at this comment) on this site. In fact. some of the same were instrumental in getting some long-time Freepers banned because of differing views. In fact, there is a thread lurking in the smoky backroom somewhere where members of a particular coven were openly talking about how nice it would bee to see more people banned. I believe that coven is among those now departed.
Hope is on the way.
Thompson will be a great candidate for the GOP.
A Common-Sense Revolution is coming.
Interesting article and interesting posts to the article.I disagree with the premise about FR in the article though. I’ve yet to see a household appliance that does every job around the house from mowing the lawn to fixing the roof but apparently Hewit thinks Free Republic is supposed to be that “do all” site on the net and there ain’t no such animal.As for some of the postings,the yearning for yesterday by some of the “old timers” here might be misguided.As a small businessman trust me when I say new blood is a GOOD thing for a business or a website because without it lock the door and shut the light cause the party’s over !!!
Here’s a Archeology forum. Go there and post consertive threads.
<"http://www.online-archaeology.co.uk/forum/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=1047">
Excuse me, Mr. Philetus, but who appointed YOU forum moderator? For your information, we post all kinds of topics here -- archeology, sports, religion, arts, health, business, crime, drugs, abortion, etc etc etc. It's not just politics 24/7. If you'll look at the posting page, you'll see that there is a HUGE variety of topics, even unnamed ones, that we can post on.
We also have a Gods Glyphs and Graves pinglist specifically on the subject of archeology. Check it out sometime!
You don't like it, take it up with the forum owner, Jim Robinson. He allows us the privilege of posting on practically any topic that interests us - archeology (and dinosaurs) included.
Look, we’re a conservative site. We’re not here to “debate” whether or not we should elect abortionists. We’re just not going to do it. Period. Don’t like it, leave.
I would hardly equate disagreeing with people to the point that they felt defeated in the arena of ideas and took their marbles and went home with petty purges by the site administration.
But knock yourself out.
You mean posters who replied to simple statements of disagreement with responses such as “up yours asswipe” and similiar uncalled for vulgarities?
Oh, wait. That was Jim Rob who said that.
Anyone who is “vile and abusive” should be banned. But claiming that JR and the mods were somehow used by a “coven” of ideological opponents to effect a remote-control purge of the true conservatives is beyond tinfoil.
And so what if people express the desire to see others banned? Did those people have the ability to ban posters? Uh, no. That would be JR and the mods, wouldn’t it?
If what you speak is true, hooray! But the stars aren’t exactly moving into alignment yet, so far as most of the rest of us can see.
You really haven’t been paying too much attention for the last 3 years, eh?
HHC’s husband.
Nope.
We shall see, won’t we?
And it would be helpful to FR’s cause if “don’t like it, leave” were the way things were handled around here. IOW, that if people get tired of being disagreed with, they leave. That’s quite different than conducting petty purges. The first-—not growing tired of advocating one’s ideas-—allows the force of one’s ideas to win (either by outright conversion of the person with another view or by attrition, that person giving up). The latter-—simply shutting up one’s opponents-—is fake victory, and that helps no one or their cause.
That was going on for a while.
There was also another episode, pre '04 election with a very famous (at the time) bloodletting thread that Jim Rob posted. More than a dozen people opused on that one.
Jarbidge. Near Elko, NV.
I have a feeling that the people who would most like to “marginalize” Free Republic are certain GOP “leaders”, particularly those who tried to open the floodgates for illegal aliens but ended up getting smacked down thanks to the “grassroots” efforts of Free Republic and talk radio.
Last month the elitist RNC idiots were seething about talk radio (Trent Lott was the only Republican who had the guts - - or stupidity - - to say something out loud) and this month it’s Free Republic. You have to wonder if they will ever get a clue.... Meanwhile, my checkbook remains closed.
Spam filter? j/k
What would a blogging area add to FR that we don't already have?
It's as if they were saying "Shut Up And Vote"...(apologies to Laura Inghram)...
Mabe they were playing the old (who else can or will they vote for) game...
It didn't work...
I posted the following statement to our front page in response to the criticism I’m receiving lately as to not being fair and balanced and perceived mistreatment of trolls and assorted malcontents. Got news for all, I’m NOT fair and balanced. I’m biased toward God, country, family, liberty and freedom and against liberalism, socialism, anarchism, wackoism, global balonyism and any other form of tyranny. Hope this helps.
Statement by the founder of Free Republic:
In our continuing fight for freedom, for America and our constitution and against totalitarianism, socialism, tyranny, terrorism, etc., Free Republic stands firmly on the side of right, i.e., the conservative side. Believing that the best defense is a strong offense, we (myself and those whom I’m trying to attract to FR) support the strategy of taking the fight to the enemy as opposed to allowing the enemy the luxury of conducting their attacks on us at home on their terms and on their schedule.
Therefore, we wholeheartedly support the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes on known terrorist states and organizations that are believed to present a clear threat to our freedom or national security. We support our military, our troops and our Commander-in-Chief and we oppose turning control of our government back over to the liberals and socialists who favor appeasement, weakness, and subserviency. We do not believe in surrendering to the terrorists as France, Germany, Russia and Spain have done and as Kerry, Kennedy, Clinton and the Democrats, et al, are proposing.
As a conservative site, Free Republic is pro-God, pro-life, pro-family, pro-Constitution, pro-Bill of Rights, pro-gun, pro-limited government, pro-private property rights, pro-limited taxes, pro-capitalism, pro-national defense, pro-freedom, and-pro America. We oppose all forms of liberalism, socialism, fascism, pacifism, totalitarianism, anarchism, government enforced atheism, abortionism, feminism, homosexualism, racism, wacko environmentalism, judicial activism, etc. We also oppose the United Nations or any other world government body that may attempt to impose its will or rule over our sovereign nation and sovereign people. We believe in defending our borders, our constitution and our national sovereignty.
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Jim Robinson
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