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.
Doh!
test
Odd, I’ve always respected Hewitt. Yet, he attacks FR after the O’Rielly debacle. He is a strategist extrodinaire, that’s for sure. I think FR is a beautiful thing. It allows intelligent people from all walks of life and talents to interact and share viewpoints and information. Most importantly, it allows the free expression of ideas, something sorely lacking in today’s society. If it’s posted on FR, it may not be pretty but it may be the truth.
It seems to me that the DBM does't have a clue what a blog is...
They have refered to this forum as a blog for 15 years and they still call the Drudge report a blog when it's fairly apparent that it is no more than a collection of the days headlines...I mean has Drudge had any thing to say about anything since the "blue dress" debut???
As to the notion that there are more conservative sites on the web, I think plays to the same reason there are more conservative radio stations... Conservatives pay attention more... ergo, more conservative sites
We’ll see about Thompson but agree with the rest.
Conservatives were betrayed by the entire republican establishment save a few.
This is a conservative website.
We’re not going to act like those betrayals never happened and get down the field to lead rah rah cheers for the Republicans to be given power again. They have to earn that passion and they’ve done a lousy job of it.
Patrick apparently wants us to be like Kos, in that they pushed aside all the values they profess to own in order to elect more Democrats for the sake of numbers. Yeah, we tried that in 2000, 2002, and 2004. We got screwed. just like the Kos members are finding out now, they won little while the pols got most of the benefits.
The amnesty fight highlighted the real problem. the People vs the Government. Patrick wants to utilize us to serve the lords in D.C. and we’re not stepping in proper tune.
He also fails to mention Rudy’s is his guy, so he’s obviously taking the purge of some of Rudy’s surrogates personally given this is a highly trafficked site.
BTW, Patrick, remember Rather? Amnesty? Miers? The Swiftees? Yeah, so do we. We’re still delivering potent kicks. Not sure the same can be said of the HughHewitt/Townhall site infested with a bitter Rudy-ite blogger and nauseating Romney cheerleader still smarting from his Miers smackdown.
Rudy Giuliani is a Conservative? If Rudy is the new definition of conservative then true conservatism is dead.
Get out for a count of noses? Get out for a some emotional jump and shout event? Or even just get out to be with like minded folk? -- That's for the young or healthy, those unencumbered by other responsibility.
We've got to find a better way to do it for the fully employed, those with kids etc. Kos will always get a lot more loosely employed singles and union members to show up than we will find among the gainfully employed and small business owners.
In the frame of mind of Kathy Bates comment 'I've got better insurance', the FR folks need to play to their strengths, not the other guy's. So, I donate to groups like Club for Growth. The young liberals I know don't donate to much beyond Starbucks.
I haven’t seen any full page ads in the Washington Times recently.
FReepers tend to be so one issue oriented if it’s not their narrow agenda they won’t get involved.
All this fmily and jobs bit is mostly rationalization.
The grass roots have been burned out.
Nope, the family and job and health aren’t fake for me. They’ve kept me tied down for some time now, especially the health thing lately.
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