Right Online

At Pajamas Media, I write about the key to a revival of the Right and the Republican Party.  The key points....

The Left didn't change their ideals, they changed the story.

In the years since 1980, Democrats cast about for a motivating purpose — a story that would carry them back to a long-term governing majority. They tried liberalism, moderation, and triangulation.

Now, they’re back. But the Left did not retake the executive and legislative branches by being more liberal or more moderate, or by clever political jujitsu. Democrats became the majority because they changed the story.

The Left and Right each built their movements out of paranoia at the machine they believed the other side had built.

[T]he modern progressives have very explicitly modeled their new movement on the movement built by the Right in the ’60s and ’70s.  Paranoia is an excellent strategist.

On what the Right must do now.

For now, the goal should be to build ideological infrastructure — organically — outside the entrenched political establishment. We should build unifying grievances. We should organize ideas and then people. The Republican Party will not lead the Right out of the problems that plague the Republican Party; it will have to follow.

If a movement is to draw a party into its orbit, the movement must have the gravitational pull of messaging, mobilization, and fundraising capacity. For now, it is our role to uncover, organize, and deliver information.

In other words — to change the story.

You can read the entire article here.

Matt Margolis has some interesting thoughts about the state of the Rightosphere - parts of which I agree with, parts of which I do not. 

Back in 2004, we were all united because we had the same goal, and we worked together to achieve it. But now conservative bloggers, unable to duplicate the fundraising prowess of the left-wing blogosphere, have made their objective to try to recreate the party in their own image from the top down rather than by true grassroots buildng from the bottom up.

The Rightosphere was unable to duplicate the fundraising prowess of the Leftosphere because we aren't really passionate about a mission.  Oh, sure, there are things about which we are all passionate.  Some people care a lot about taxes, others about spending, others about the war, or Iraq, or immigration, or earmarks, or any of a hundred other things.  But what is the common thread?  What do each of those things have to do with the other, except "it's what our team generally advocates"?   If there's any unifying thread to the Right's issues, it has been undone by the Republican Party's actual behavior.

But in what sense are Righty bloggers trying to recreate the party in their own image from the top down?  By arguing for their own conception of what the Party should be?   That's exactly what the Left did.  Progressive bloggers organised the netroots by telling a story about what the Democratic Party could and should be.  The communities arose because people rallied around the conception of the Democratic Party being espoused by people like Markos, Jerome Armstrong, Matt Stoller, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Kevin Drum, Duncan Black, Chris Bowers, Josh Marshall, John Aravosis and others.

I see plenty of top-down objectives on the Right, but not much of that in the Rightosphere.

Conservative blogging used to be about building community. But it has become something that is elitist, DC-centric, and contrary to grassroots empowerment.

This is exactly backwards.  The Rightosphere has never been about "community".  Some Right-of-center blogs have developed sizable communities in the form of comment sections (LGF, Malkin, Hot Air), but very few right-of-center blogs have developed genuine, interactive, participatory communities.   Red State has been a diary/community site for quite some time, though (for a variety of reasons) never approaching the size of Daily Kos.  Next Right is a diary/community site, but still much newer and smaller.  The Rightosphere has been about media criticism and punditry, not community and activism.

And the Rightosphere has never been DC-centric and elitist.  Many of the prominent Lefty bloggers are DC residents, but very, very few of the prominent Righty bloggers are based in DC.  Glenn Reynolds (Knoxville), Ed Morrissey and Powerline (Minneapolis), Pajamas, Volokh and Red State (scattered), RealClearPolitics (Chicago).  The people behind The Next Right are an exception, but the point of this site is that Ruffini, Dayton and I are in the unusual position of being at the nexus between the political world and the internet media.

It's difficult for non-DC bloggers to do DC-centric things, of course, but the Leftosphere became powerful by going outside of the Democratic establishment.

We were destined as a community to fail our party’s nominee when we made the primary season the quest to find the next Ronald Reagan. ... too many decided that since McCain didn’t score high enough on the “Ronald Reagan Scale” that they weren’t going to help him win.

This strikes me as an odd criticism.  If a sports team doesn't attract enough fans to make money...the problem is the team, not the fans.  McCain lost because he didn't get enough votes.  The problem is not Republicans (or bloggers) were insufficiently loyal.  The problem is that Republicans are not offering people an an agenda that people want to vote for.  If Republicans are alienating voters, don't get indignant at the voters.  "Blame the victim" is not a good way to stop losing elections.

Now, an area of agreement.  Margolis suggests ways to get back on track.

Get Local ... All politics is local and it doesn’t matter what I, a blogger in New York, says about about a congressional race in California or a gubernatorial race in Washington...

Do you know how you can have the biggest impact with a blog?  Skip the 10,000th blog about national politics and start a hyper-focused blog.  Write about either (a) something on which you have real expertise, or (b) something you can do genuine research and information gathering.   Start a blog about your city council, the EPA, your local newspaper, a Lefty blog, a think tank, or your school board.   If you do it well, you probably still won't have a lot of readers.  But those you have will be very, very important readers. 

We need less punditry, more information gathering, information organization and specialization.

Promote Candidates, Not Your Own Agenda ... I am sick and tired of conservative bloggers wasting time and effort on the wrong things. Trying to influence who is chosen for leadership positions in the Senate or who becomes chairman of the party are the wrong battles.

I certainly encourage Margolis to fight the battles he wants to fight, but bloggers can and have had an impact on leadership races.  I can attest that political offices pay attention to what bloggers are writing.  It matters.

But "promote candidates, not your own agenda" sounds an awful lot like "shut up and sing".  Supporting the party is not a good way to fix the party.  It only subsidizes bad behavior.  Eventually, the Republican Party will again align its agenda with a sufficiently large coalition, and retake a majority. 

Until that happens, bloggers should promote candidates who do promote the blogger's agenda.

Margolis seems unhappy that the Rightosphere has been unable to unite behind Republicans, and there are certainly a variety of things the Right and the Republican Party needs to do better online.  But blaming the bloggers confuses the symptoms for the disease.  In order to fix the problems on the Right, we need...

• ...better information organization, which helps create coalesce a movement around...
• ...the organizing agenda, out of which flows...
• ...the storyline, narrative, which motivates...
• ...the grassroots/netroots to get engaged, mobilized and donating, all of which is channeled effectively by...
• ...the infrastructure, both online and offline.

Recently, Matt Stoller at OpenLeft noted that transparency is a place for bipartisan coalitions:

Transparency is one of the few places where there really is a bipartisan alliance.  Newt Gingrich created Thomas, the web resources for legislation, and the Republicans do have a history of advocating for open government and new models of communication, including C-Span, direct mail, and web communication.  Some progressive Democrats do as well, but the old school top-down Democrats elected under the good government influences of the 1970s tend towards restricting political participation.

A number of conservative groups, under the umbrella of  Show Me The Spending, have been pushing the idea of requiring state governments, check the progress here, to put all spending on the web, modeled on the Coburn-Obama:

With your assistance and the help of a wide-ranging coalition of organizations, Congress passed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, creating a website (now located at www.usaspending.gov) where visitors can search for federal grant and contract spending.  This was a great victory for government transparency, but now we need to replicate this win in all 50 states.

The basic idea is that every disbursement by the state government would be recorded. The amount, the date, the recipient, etc. This is not a partisan issue, although it creates the context for populist revolts. In Washington state, a law was passed through both Democratic controlled houses and signed by a Democratic governor.

Even better, this can be done by governors through executive order. Once people and the press start using that, there will be a constituency that will prevent a bad governor from repealing. And once we achieve transparency at the state level, we can push it down into the municipalities.

As I said, this creates conditions that support a populist revolt. Grover Norquist has described each of these as little earmarks that can be exposed, and it provides the record that you can wrap around the neck of corrupt politicians.

We need this kind of stuff. Let's go to work.