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.
Change for the sake of change is stupid.
And FR is far more easy to use and find information than any blog I see.
Cannoneer No. 4: I believe philetus just demonstrated your point.”
I think the point is on the top of your heads.
Both of your posts in this thread are designed to try to convince Freepers they are wasting their time on FR.
In other words, IMHO, both of you are trolls.
I may wish that the purges were less, or even wish that so many good posters hadn't moved up to more aethereal realms. But we seem to be getting new members and are replenished with youth.
And I disagree that the WAPO LAT settlement is good law, and hope it will someday be stricken down -- for we should be able to extract under fair use. What a burden to apt discussion it is to not be able to quote the pertinent parts of articles or even to post links!
Rats HATE being protested. Keep up the great work...
I disagree completely with the tone set by this article.
The author makes a moral and functional equivalence between FR and Daily Kos with the description of FR as the “Daily Kos of the right”.
It isn’t. He thinks the function of someplace like FR is to rally people to swarm to online polls and sway them en-masse or to raise money.
It is neither of those things. It is a place to discuss issues and ideas, something not ACTUALLY done on liberal analogs like DU and Daily Kos. Not to say it is without emotion, bias and occasional mistreatment by both admins and other posters, but it is not the howling at the moon environment like DU.
I viewed their point as a call to engage in real conversation and debate, rather than come up with one line rebuttels that add nothing.
FROM THE ARTICLE...did ya even READ IT??
Finally, let’s look at the center-right blogosphere. Its watershed moments were 9/11 and CBS memogate.
I’ve watched the party higher ups, and staff, since before Reagan. By and large they have been unimaginative, poorly communicative dullards, and of a type. Often they assumed, if not depended upon, popular disgust with Democrats as proof of their effective works. When in fact they where little more than wasteful inheritors.
"...but what else can you go on?" ;^)
Like the RNC can get a turn out anywhere! (snicker)
The Sheehan purging was interesting, as it gave KOS the opportunity to show their DNC credits. But as there IS no conservative Democrat contingent anymore, I stand with my original comment. It's Democrat Party Liberalism.
They can’t, and they brought it on themselves!
I have wondered about the Wikipedia issue.I think the Wiki software, and even content, is more or less open source. If that's true, I'd wonder if John Robinson could grab a copy of Wikipedia, put it on a server, and allow us to edit it into a frankly conservative version of the "objective" (read, "liberal") original.
I can however envision that causing flame wars and opuses, since it would entail codifying precisely what conservatism is and is not. Conceivably it could be made to have several different flavors, so that factions could be represented in parallel universes sharing a common body of noncontroversial reference material . . .
Dan’s Bake sale. ( sort of )
What was that bridge/road the people opened up and dared the Forest Service greenies to close?
Where was the RNC on KELSO? With their developer friends?
Ruby Ridge.
They could, but then they’d have to meet the unwashed. So, no cold finger sandwiches for us.
Amen brother!
#271,633...ya noobie! ;^)
It certainly is.
Bravo!!!
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