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.
"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." - Yogi Berra
As an example, look at FR support for Gathering of Eagles, etc
And one more seizure away from three.
I agree. There is less substance, fewer links to good information. We need to raise our standards a little.
It’s more than mere complacency. There’s a good supply of P.C. that’s being pushed on us, perhaps in part because of the O’Reilly FR bash the other night, but also because in my opinion the group has increasingly listed to the left of center.
Exactly. I think people like Kristinn, Dr. Raoul, the Trooprally’s and many others are the “warriors” and “boots on the ground” if I may hijack the military terms to analogize their participation on FR.
I think online organization is great, but the idea that FR should be the equivalent of Howard Dean or Ron Paul’s organizational model is just off base.
FR is a private site for the exchange of ideas and facilitates the meeting of like (and sometimes “not like”) minded people who may have a common goal.
As far as I am concerned, FR is a private website. If you want to use it or not, it is your choice. If you want to pay or not to support it, it is your choice. But to somehow think Jim Robinson has curtailed freedom of speech misses the point...it is his house.
Like living at home with your parents, there is no “freedom of speech” in their house. They pay the bills and set the rules. If I don’t like the way it is run on FR, I can leave and not contribute. That is the free market at its essence.
Perhaps related, why do we no longer have troll attacks? While they were sometimes initiated with a hair trigger, they were fun and provided the edge for testing for trolls.
Some of the sites, indeed, discourage members from being more than simple readers.
That said, while criticizing FR, it would have been nice to mention that the place most of the purge-ees landed censored immigration debate to such a point that they were only allowed ONE thread a week--and the software made it difficult to find, let alone follow, the points being made.
Other sites were kook magnets or draconian in their policies. FR remains our best bet.
This site is still a powerhouse.
Speaking from someone who has been her almost from the beginning, (#9407) this site has changed and evolved.
In the beginning, this site was simply a message board where like minded conservative people came together to educate themselves on political issues and expose political and government corruption. There were some very high ended political discussions almost daily. Threads were deep thinking and informative. I miss those days.
Today, this site is more of a clearinghouse of news and information that strains out the bias and exposes the MSM lies, distortions and disinformation.
I don't speak for JimRob, but I'm sure he had no idea back in the late 90's we would be the powerhouse of political conservatism we are today that can influence the national political viewpoint.
Every major news organization, political group and general snake oil salesman in DC checks this site out.
I am glad Freepers don’t drink Hugh & Company’s koolaid. If we did, every GOP decision would be deemed to be perfect and unquestionable.
Lets just picture their “perfect” world: Harriet Miers would be the chief justice of the supreme court; borders with Mexico would be wide open (welcome to the NAU!); we would have 100 million new hispanic democrat voters; the No Amigo Left Behind Act would ensure that all new citizens get a quality college education; Patriot Act VI would have just been ratified; CFR II would be in place and the Law of the Sea Treaty would guarantee UN funding forever.
Wouldn’t that be great?
Oh, and I forgot to mention that we would all be expected at HCI/Planned Parenthood’s Giuliani fundraiser tonight.
Very true!
That's right on target, the principal problem is the Conservatives have no nationally elected leader. Bush has done at best a mediocre job of articulating Conservative values, and some would say he has done nothing in this regard. The war has been all consuming, and the reasons for it not very well explained to the voters -- Heck we can't even identify the enemy at times.
However, that having been said, maybe it is a time for an introspective look at how FreeRepublic can be more effective. We tend to thrive on external media and react against that. That is not very proactive by it's nature.
But out pops an opportunity.
Doesn't everybody see what is coming in September, the Petraous report, and how the terrorists in Iraq are aligning themselves with the actions of congressional Democrats and the drive by media in the US to sand bag the report? -- Let me explain further, the Iraq terrorists through their enablers in the Iraq parliament have shut down the Iraq government for vacation -- At a critical time. Why would they do this? Simple is precludes any real progress on the political front in Iraq, at a critical time when it is needed most. Remember those vaunted benchmarks, half military and half political? Equal weight, stop the political progress, yell failure. This plays directly into the waiting arms of the US Democrats and the drive by media -- See it's never going to work out in Iraq, Iraqis are never going to get their act together, without political progress it's never going to work, we must leave now.
So why are we sitting here and letting this happen? And what should we or could we do about it? Now is the time to prepare.
A call to action? Surly we should be thinking about how to respond. Maybe we need inclusive actions oriented blog(s) with marching orders?
At the moment we appear way to passive(tired?) after the AMNESTY win. We have gained political capital from that, maybe we should try to build on it. Shift to strategic instead of reactive? Think about the future, plan, and ...
Just asking, not pointing fingers at anyone...
The character of a party is set by its office holders and candidates, not the staff. The RNC is a fundraising/campaign organization. Its job is to help Republicans beat Democrats. Period.
If we can find and nominate another Reagan, the RNC will be as Reaganite as any of us could desire. If we nominate a RINO, the RNC will be RINO central. The RNC is not a central committee enforcing a party line. It is ultimately up to the voters in Republican primaries to crack the whip.
Build on it indeed. You are exactly right. In some of my previous posts, I’ve asked that people flood Washington DC with letters, faxes, and phone calls: Don’t let this war, like the Vietnam war, be lost due to politics. We ARE winning the war in Iraq, but if we snooze through this critical time, we’ll lost it in Washington DC.
What do you think might help wake people up? Would a new blogging area on FR be helpful? If so, what else?
Ug, spell checkers don’t catch some errors—”lost it” should be “lose it.”
Would you please get your elbow outta my rib. lol
Reaction always involves following not leading, we should try to capitalize on the AMNESTY capital we acquired, and try our hand at leading instead of following. Newt is crafting a new contract with America, maybe we could help with the drafting. A series of diaries on it would be informative.
I guess I see good areas in what Ruffini says, we should think hard about how to make our actions more effective. There are a lot of really good thinkers on the FR, we should try and figure out how to use them better.
This comment really hit home ...
What a waste. Imagine how the history of the rightroots could have been different if Free Republic wasn’t still stuck in 1996?
Maybe we should ask Ruffini what he would suggest. Soliciting outside input could be good. All things need rejuvenating, it is not a bad thing. A lot depends on what Jim wants to do.
You are illustrating our points well. Why don’t you troll-off and post pithy, one-liners elsewhere, Newbie.”
Now it’s our points. What exactly is your point.
All I read was how,according to you (three?) is how FR is
devoid of all the intelligent posters and if my replies are pithy, one-liners then it would appear yours are also.
Up yours on that Newbie crap.
Notice the article doesn’t mention the breaking news aspect of FR.... perhaps our biggest and best trait.
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