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.
Yep. I’m waitin’ on April ‘08.
Yes, that was my point ;-).
And I was referring specifically to the Manson Girls.
Hey,you know what,you and the mods here are PLENTY fair and balanced. Most of the dopes who criticize you guys couldn’t run a toll booth on a highway. Running an open site like FR and keeping it fun,interesting,yes controversial and relevant without having it spiral out of control is a real juggling act and you do it well.Trust me I’ve been bounced from enough sites I could have used the name rubberball instead of Obie Wan but you guys have let me have my say where others wouldn’t !!!
I am curious, can you link me the thread you posted?
Swarm this Kos.......ya sore-losers !
Excuse me, Mr. Philetus, but who appointed YOU forum moderator? For your information, we post all kinds of topics here”
I posted to you in response to your whiny, complaining post #152, which is below.
Is there anything you don’t whine about?
This forum ain’t what it used to be.
My first glimmer of this was when I posted a thread a week or so ago, and it immediately became filled with graphics, songs, and stupid comments. It was a thread on dinosaurs & archeology. Someone posted a huge picture of Barney the Dinosaur (giant purple graphic). Someone else posted lyrics to a song, Alley Oop. Too bad the poster of a thread couldn’t moderate their own thread, deleting unwanted posts. Only downside is, you might end up only talking to yourself. Which might not be so bad. Needless to say, all the garbage they posted were thread killers, and I immediately abandoned the thread after the song lyrics were posted. Why waste my time wading through all that stuff. Too bad we couldn’t get the moderators on our side, to delete all the unwanted garbage.
152 posted on 08/05/2007 12:16:47 PM PDT by my_pointy_head_is_sharp (The Morlocks are above-ground now, and nobody seems to care.)
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Bump!
The day FR becomes an arm of ANY political party is the day I’ll opus. FR is independent because of you and the site you set up. KOS is a wholly owned subsidiary of the dims.
God bless FR!
Free Republic - The largest collection of volunteer Freedom Fighters the world has ever known
September will align them with a laser.
Naturally, you revise history. The coven was very good at ganging up on their opponents, starting flame wars and then getting the target banned.
So few feel any sympathy for them getting a taste of their own medicine.
Ok where is our FR conference with the leadership?
Where is the FReep of Kos?
This article is to marginalize the #1 conservative forum in the nation (per a recent article #8 conservative site overall)
However CNN does not cover FR beause it bootstraps these articles with a MEME. “FR is marginal”
rinse and repeat.
We need to FReep the CNN and PMSNBC to force them to acknowlege us.
(BTW remember when Rush made fun of the typical FR poster? Not so much now.)
Web 2.0 is fairness doctrine to censor the internet.
Must be nice to have the MSM giving 100’s of hours of free publicity.
If the MSM was interested in “fairness doctrine” they would give equal time to FR.
Keep in mind the some of those Rudy-bots were either paid posters or part of the viral agencies campaign effort.
The kos is a PAID for support site. That capitalist limo liberal there CHARGES candidates cash for support via a “consulting fee”. (see Lieberman is still senator)
FR does have a good record of cleaning out viral advertising efforts.
i second that observation
To be blunt about it: Duh.
I know you’ve posted that a million times, and at least once or twice to me.
I am addressing the issue of HOW to best effect FR’s goals. Turning that point into some strawman that you are being urged to be “fair and balanced” is not helpful.
Be biased toward your ideology all you want. But what are you going to do to advance your cause? Defeat people in the arena of ideas or simply shut people up? Or does your bias not extend to believing sufficiently in the strength of your ideas to overcome and win out? That is not equivalent to allowing FR to become a “liberal debating society.”
Further, I am not talking about the treatment of “trolls and assorted malcontents” and I believe you know that.
This is liberal orthodoxy if I've ever heard it. Nothing but some version of "the devil made me do it," "the man made me do it," "root causes made me do it," "it's all society's fault," blah blah blah blah. If the "target" engaged in conduct that was offensive enough that the mods---not the "coven," mind you---banned him, what caused the ban? Uh, the "target's" own conduct. Even if someone does---oh, boo hoo---start a flame war against you, is your response outside your control and, therefore, is whether or not you commit conduct that could get you banned outside your control? Conservatism is about taking personal responsibility. The "coven" did not commit the conduct that got the "target" banned, nor did the "coven" have the authority to ban anyone. That would be the mods. But, unless the JR and the mods are total nincompoops (is that what you are saying?), a person gets banned for his *personal* conduct on the forum. Right?
“Web 2.0” is just a euphemism for greater interactivity among internet users, whether it’s photo sharing with Flickr, social networking with Myspace, or easily posting a screed on a blog.
How does the fairness doctrine play into it?
No, it's the core conservative concept of seeing someone hoisted on their own petard. Nothing more, nothing less.
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