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, Wheres our YearlyKos?
Its 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 dont 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, theres 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, youve probably been purged. Free Republics 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 wont 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 wasnt 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 wed 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 didnt 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. Bears 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 lefts total was Kos).
Looking beyond the blogosphere, a place the MSM isnt as familiar with, and youll 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 theyve always been. My concern with some of the sites I discussed above is that for ten long years, they havent been giving our people Web experiences that teach them how to be more than simple readers.
Excellent point; although my theory is that everything, everywhere has gotten ruder and cruder as the MTV generation has risen. The children of the Boomers were raised with no manners. Feminism and to a certain extent, the civil rights movement, had a lot to do with trashing ALL social codes along with the no-longer-needed ones.
i don’t listen to hug spewitt.
That of course does not take into account the number of lurkers who never sign up, but still visit the site.
I like these ideas very much.
I'm honestly wondering, did you ask the mods? I've had pretty good luck with getting disruptive posts deleted.
Some of those Rudy-bots were Bushbots extrordinaire in ‘04.
This was going on at least as far back as ‘03.
As I said before, good riddance to bad rubbish!
HHC’s husband, a.k.a. His Royal Podness.
Y'all need to buy a clue. Sometimes emotions get high (and that goes for the Admin Mods too - not criticizing them, they have a very tough and generally thankless job) and people say or post things they should not. Things were not as they seemed in '03-early '07.
Sanity has been restored to FR and I for one am glad to see it. If you want perfect, go to Walgreen's.
ha ha ha.
I asked her if she'd vote for Guiliani. She said "Yes, I'd vote for him. I like Guiliani.". I asked her if she'd vote for Fred Thompson. "No!" "Why not?" "I don't trust him." "You don't trust the guy from Law and Order?" "No, I'd never vote for him." "What about Duncan Hunter?" "Who's he?" "Never mind."
November 24, 2000.
How cute!!!!!!!!
See post 248. That’s what I mean when I say Rudy is a viable candidate.
Ping
Well said SC Swamp Fox Well said!
Why don’t you troll-off and post pithy, one-liners elsewhere, Newbie.
philetus
Since Oct 11, 2001
Kids!
Here’s the part of Cannoneer No. 4’s post that started this:
“This forum ain’t what it used to be. The IQ level here has dropped precipitiously since I joined. Lots of highly intelligent, articulate, engaging Freepers don’t come here much any more. They have moved on. The simple readers don’t miss them.”
Did you even bother to read it before you posted to me?
Did you even bother to read it before you posted to me?
Yes I did. And I happen to (for the most part) agree.
Spot On!
I hope you get the Post Of The Day Award.
NO2
You asked me about numbers a while ago. See post 36 (and elsewhere on this thread) if you’re still curious.
off topic - you may want to check the grammar in your tagline
Tnx, the grammar police :)
Even if a few posts are deleted, the general tone generally kills the thread.
Your right! THX!
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