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.
check
This is just simply wrong!!!
The crux of the problem, as conservatives, we don't NEED to be led. We don't recieve our marching orders from the establishment, nor do we WANT to be led by the establishment.
That's the problem with conservative governmental leadership, "conservative" and "governmental leadership" are antithetical. One has to give way to the other, unfortunately it's usually the "conservative" part that concedes.
All I got was my user name.
Who wrote this, Mojo?
HHC's husband
I wish there was a way that we could know who is here and what each person’s skill set is.
I got 271,633.
LOL! HHC’s husband
The IQ level here has dropped precipitiously since I joined. Lots of highly intelligent, articulate, engaging Freepers don’t come here much any more.”
I agree with you that the IQ level dropped when you joined.
“Free Republic does not have the clout ot get members to turn out. It has been marginalized.”
i think it’s hard to compare the differences in grassroots organization on the left and right. the left doesn’t have talk radio: the right does and that is a fierce problem for the left because talk radio hosts do educate and galvanize along with sites like FR (to wit the immigration debate). the power of the radio is that it reaches people who tune in spontaneously and this may convert some minds. that is less likely on a website. anyway, if a candidate finds a way to unite the forces of the right (radio, websites, blogs, RNC, Conservative Party, etc), i am convinced the right would be more powerful.
#181,075 here
There is an About page where Freepers who want that information known about themselves can post it.
And a good thing too. The RudyBots were the same jackals that would hit the abuse button like a gang rape on someone and get them banned.
I don't miss them. Not one little bit.
Good riddance to bad rubbish! HHC's husband
That's a mystification, and wrong. The Republican Party is a confederational, not a Leninist, party. There are rip-snorting battles for control among various factions all the time at the county level and periodically at the state level.
The RNC itself, however, is simply a confederation of the state parties. There are 165 members: a national committeman, national committeewoman, and a state chairman from each of the States, the territories, and D.C. You want to be on the RNC? Go ahead: get active in local GOP politics and run for national committeman or state chairman. Nobody from D.C. is going to annoint you.
The full RNC meets a couple of times a year. It elects a Chairman and an executive committee to hire the staff and run the day-to-day business. Its unending mission is to raise money to help Republicans beat Democrats. Its other great continuing mission is to organize the Republican National Convention, which is the ultimate governing body of the Party. It is the Convention, not the RNC, that establishes the rules of the national Party. The RNC itself is a creation of the Convention.
You want to reform the rules and mission of the RNC? Easy enough, in theory. Get yourself elected as a delegate to the National Convention. This is usually done in your local Republican primary or at the state convention, if you're in a convention state. It's not that hard if you've got serious grassroots credentials at the local and state level. The number of delegates varies by state, but there's quite a crowd. There's usually an "official" slate put together by the state committee, but insurgents can and do get elected. Takes a little work, though.
If there are any past or present county chairmen on this thread, I'd invite you to weigh in. My point is simply that power flows from the grassroots up. That can make for a long slog to the top -- we don't have hereditary peerages like the democrats, with a lot of appointed or ex officio delegates.
Alexa doesn’t provide reliable stats.
That’s the kind of insightful comment that beautifully illustrates the point I was trying to make.
Thanks!
Really? I've always found their stats to be fairly accurate... I'll keep a sharper eye when using them, thanks.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.