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.
It's from a shill from the RNC, which is hardly surprising, considering the beating the RNC took from FR, talk radio and alternate conservative media over shamnesty.
If all that is so ineffective, then why did shamnesty fail so utterly? This article is nothing more than sour grapes over the fact that the RNC lost most of its influence over the grassroots during the Bush Admin years.
I think he makes some good points.
“If you support Rudy Giuliani, who still has a decent shot at being our nominee, you’ve probably been purged.” This is a real problem. If Rudy IS the nominee, will FR support the Dem candidate? The level of hostility directed at this very viable candidate is counterproductive. We should know all the negatives on all of the candidates - recognizing that we will never get everything we want in one person - but the personal attacks serve only to alienate FR from the GOP - which marginalizes our utility in the fight.
“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.” This is true - but that is not the kind of site envisioned by JimRob. Kristinn has taken it to the True Activist level in DC, but otherwise we are not really ‘out there’ much. And it’s a shame... FR could have been Conservative Central for news and information.
I used to be able to find ANY story first on FR. It’s still my favorite site and a daily read, but no longer sufficient in itself.
FR will never win a fair use case to post complete articles.
While there are things here that I don't like, this has never been a GOP site. KOS clearly states that his site is to get democrats elected.
apparently web 2.0 will allow more third party control of search results. Thus if you type in Rebpublican HQ, it can also be required to produce Democrat HQ.
If you enter Freerepublic.com it will spit out the DUmmies site.
It will give “parity” as if equal despite current ranking differences.
The RNC has too many 1970 elitists who don’t get the power of the net to connect.
Viable for what?
Rudy's viable for way too many conservative positions, such as pro-life, pro-gun, anti-global warming, pro-free speech, anti-special-gay-rights and pro-liberty. The GOP has to nominate someone from the center of the party, not the far left.
The ones that do have jobs are nothing but professional protesters.
Call me later. My violin is at the shop.
You mean like Bloggers & Personal?
Where’s the George $oro$ of the Right?
That isn’t at all what “web 2.0” is. Web 2.0 is not a technical term. It’s just a phrase to describe sites that allow any registered user to upload and share content easily. Search algorithms are a different animal, altogether.
At last! Someone I can ask! How does one find out one's FReeper number?
Never mind. And thanks.
“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,”
Pantload alert.
The best way for FReepers to continue to make a difference is to get out from behind the keyboards and form chapters that meet face-to-face, with the goal of performing services to a cause.
As the DC Chapter has learned by meeting every week to FReep at Walter Reed and other key political events in DC, not every member has to come out every time, but it is only through personal interaction that we really learn who people are, what their strengths and skills are, and how they can be deployed into useful activism well beyond keyboarding.
Get out there, folks! Form an FR Chapter to support your nearest veteran's hospital, American Legion or VFW Post — something everyone can agree on — and then when a candidate has finally been hashed out, you will already be in strong relationships and ready to roll on the issues, man the phones, canvass voters, place signs, et cetera.
Start locally, and work outward. Please see post 236.
I totally agree. I just went over to some of the new sites and they can't hold a candle. They also don't have military or religion posts, and many of the other features possible here.
Wouldn't be prudent to lift another site's contents.
Someone may have answered this already, but there is a site started by Phyllis Schlafly's son, Andrew Schlafley, that is providing content from the conservative point of view: Conservapedia.
To date, it is tiny, with only 16,000 entries, compared to Wikipedia's nearly 2 million. Here is Wikipedia's critique of Conservapedia.
Jan 10, 2000 ID#:28465 here, you must have been later in the year. When exactly?
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