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.
True, and we should remember also that the majority of Freepers are older people than those at the kos. FR has many many retired people. That makes it harder to get a large enough crowd to make a lot of noise. Older people tend to be more conservative. Young people have all that energy, but they are stupid and witout life experience. We have to use our heads to get things done. Thank God for Free Republic, and thank God for Jim Robinson.
That’s the kind of insightful comment that beautifully illustrates the point I was trying to make.”
You’re really full of yourself.
Thank you for staying here with us simpletons while your peers have all moved on.
That is a profound rationalization.
The issue of the day is the war in Iraq. The Speaker of the House and the Senate Leader have denounced the war. Many small organizations representing the fragmented left will join to howl their support fot ending the war now, that very day.
Free Republic, a grass roots organization will muster a few, those who are always there rain or shine. The majority will stay home and make self congratulatory posts as they bask in the reflected action on the Mall.
Just happened to stop by after a long absence. See that most of the old-timers have been banned or run-off. Hmm. When you purge your most experienced and committed long-term posters over a *political disagreement,* of course you weaken your cause and tarnish your reputation as well as your effectiveness.
It's sad, because FR once was a powerhouse.
What have you been smoking, FRiend?
That's fine if you just want your own opinons repeated right back at you. I prefer open debate.
I don't know about the "jackals" who keep hitting the "abuse" button--if there was no actual abuse going on, why would people get banned?
While you’re at it, also ask for the stats on the percentage of posters broken down by sign-up date. I think you will find that most of the FR veterans were recently banned or shoved off by TPTB. Is that indicative of anything?
That is where the difference lies.
Thanks and bookmark for later
Wrong, but true.
“Youth is wasted on the young.” —George Bernard Shaw
Cannoneer No. 4: I believe philetus just demonstrated your point.
actually, many of us would fax, make phone calls to many reps/Senators and make our voices heard as well.
I got 15,711
I meant in a central location rather than looking at each person's profile.
KOS is even more of a DNC site than liberal! Why no mention in this article of the purging of Cindy Sheehan at KOS? She was once their patron saint over there but now that she’s a thorn in Nancy Palosi’s side, she’s thrown under the bus!
Is Patrick Ruffini someone I should know? Never heard of him. But, he’s a pretty good axe grinder
Then your point is that JR and the mods---the people who banned the "Rudybots" apparently for their political views---are actually "AbuseButtonBots"---all you have to do to "get" someone banned, is hit the abuse button? Voila, it's done? No abuse actually has to have occurred? Button=banned, no thought involved?
Kewl. I did not know that.
Most Freepers aren't trust fund babies, who can follow the 'rock concerts' around the country to show support. On the contrary, we are the people who keep the economy rolling. There are other ways to raise money and get attention to our causes than just having conventions, and I don't think Freepers enthusiasm is less because they don't go to them.
What has impacted the enthusiasm of grass-roots conservatives, including many of us, is the way the RNC threw away the opportunity we gave them. They said if they had the majorities, and the presidency, that they would move our small government, conservative values forward, but they didn't. They gave us more big government, more intrusive government and paid lip-service to our values.
The big question now isn't what new internet rallying the right can come up with to stay ahead of the left's netroots, it's who we'll find to rally around that will follow through with their promises to us.
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