Online Politics, the Right and The Next Right

I spoke to Ed Cone, of CIO Insight, last week to discuss online politics, branding and the Next Right.

CIOI: What happened to the Right that makes a site like yours necessary?

Henke: People on the Left would like to believe that the philosophy has failed. People on the Right would like to believe the people have failed, if we just elect better people we'll be fine. I think both of those are off the mark. Fundamentally what failed was the movement itself. We erected a movement based on two ideas: elect Republicans, to limit government. They elected Republicans, and then they didn't have a politically viable way to actually limit government, and so they settled for the first -- and so instead of a vast right wing conspiracy we had a half-vast right wing conspiracy.

What needs to be fixed is the movement needs to organize itself to actually accomplish the second part of the goal. Just electing Republicans is not enough, what you get is a corrupt Republican Party that is not an effective vehicle for the actual goals of the movement.  [...]

CIOI: You guys are playing catch-up. How did liberals take the lead online?

Henke: The web is conducive to insurgency movements. That's been the Democrats for the last eight years. They were out of power and needed different tools. Progressives perceived that the political culture had shifted, but the Democratic Party did not shift with it, so they began telling a story about a different vision of the Democratic Party and the political system. They made fundamental criticisms of both parties and the media, and rallied a lot of people to them. They erected a very effective mechanism for bringing the party in their direction, they created a gravitational pull so the political leaders and the money people had to come to them. That has fundamentally reshaped the Democratic Party. The Republican Party, on the other hand, was perceived by most in its base as being a more effective machine.

CIOI: So there's no ideological basis for the gap?

Henke: People forget that the Right was ahead online in the '90s. Sites like NewsMax, Drudge Report, and World Net Daily were very successful. They still have large audiences, but never really made the transition to Web 2.0. They're one-way: we present the news, you read it, end of transaction. The Right does a lot of things well online, like microtargeting of voters, things the Left is just doing now. That the Left is catching up in those areas is a major accomplishment, and the Right is going to have to think about what the Left does well: mobilizing communities around specific ideas, and messaging to the media and the base.

More at the link.