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.
Hugh seems to have forgotten the major role F/R played with the whole Dan Rather Fontgate / TNG story in 2004.
If that's the case, then I guess I'll just take my ball and go home.
I couldn't disagree more. If we are so marginal, why is O'Reilly coming after us? Because we are influential. Comparing us with the Kosmunistics, is ludicrous.
Two words for Democrats,Republicans and America in general.
Power Corrupts!
Agreed. You can have all the pro bowlers you want but without a good coach a team isn’t going anywhere.
Hugh’s panties are still a stitch too tight from his Harriet Miers spanking on FR.
Wrong. FR has ALWAYS been marginalized. It is too grass roots for the RNC, a Tory elitist, financialists, hereditary organization that at it best disdains working class conservatives in the millions, small business in the hundred of thousands with their petty gripes. We have done nothing for the RNC and the Republican party save raise money, voters and issues in local and national media. With zero thanks. FR was near neigh responsible for bringing down Dan Rather and many other successful illuminations of MSM lies, distortions and out right daily sloppiness. Something that the billions of dollars spent by the RNC could never do. (Of course it is hard to be taken seriously when you wear an ascot in the shower.)
Anyways, we don't need the RNC, the Republican party anyways. Real politics is in the street, at the one to one level. Elitists of all stripes that think productive citizens are some sort of resource cattle to be mobilized in some lame campaign by one of their overpaid hack friends with a 'consulting' business, haven't a clue. Internet and talk radio is the reality. Politics shuffles along in the dust of our passions and ideas.
One good thing you can be sure of with Hugh is that if you were in a bar fight, by the time you got to the car, it would be all warmed up and with windows defrosted.
That said, PR is dead wrong re: FR and its' impact. It is truly a wonderful site and the modern day equivalent of the townhall meeting where the people could voice their opninion in 2-way dialogs.
The old MSM is strictly one-way and is dying...thank God!
Now we have a Democratic congress and no contender for the White House.
There are two more Supreme Court nominees to be had and war on terrorism to fight!
It’s time for us to do something more
About the RNC. Don’t mistake their constant work of decades as an error.
Ok BB1 ..... How many FReepers will be at the most important event of the year, The Gathering of Eagles II. Will you be there?
Free Republic does not have the clout ot get members to turn out. It has been marginalized.
I think this was written by Patrick Ruffini?
Hugh admits to having his clock cleaned. I can’t recall whether he admits to being wrong about Miers, but I think he does. I believe Hewitt knows FR was key on the amnesty bill, as well.
Post #8 says more about the real state of affairs than all of the RNC snivelling you’ll read from now until Hillary moves into the White House.
Exactly right. He also fails to cite any evidence of our “marginalization”, and destroys his own argument at the very end by conceding that we’re still the big kahuna of the conservative web.
This sounds like a plea to add more interactive, web 2.0 features disguised as a eulogy for FR.
The author seems to miss the point. FR is for the free exchange of ideas from a conservative standpoint, NOT for the indoctrination of the useful idiots. FR will be here long after the propagana mills have come and gone.
I have to agree [sigh].
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