Oct 30 2008

Let’s not Kosify ourselves, shall we?

Posted by Neocon in Conservatism, Democrats, Republicans

I think that it’s safe to dabble in a little fortunetelling today without jinxing our chances with the Maverick next Tuesday. Rick Moran writes an excellent post over at Right Wing Nut House about the rumblings among the bigger players on our side of the blogosphere over what we must do after the election in order to not just survive, but thrive and compete with the nutroots for the foreseeable future.

The growing consensus seems to be that we must form a more unified online collective akin to those found on the left in order to amplify our message delivery. In theory this isn’t a bad idea, but like so many things that seem good on paper and involve collectives, it just doesn’t sit right with me when we start to get into the nuts and bolts of it.

To explain my point (and shamelessly piggyback off Rick) here’s a quote from Patrick Ruffini:

What will it take to turn this around? If you’re a conservative blogger, the question you need to ask yourself is this. Is the main purpose of your blog to express your personal opinion? Or is its primary purpose to build political power for a cause? If you cannot answer yes to the latter, you’re probably not going to be comfortable with making the changes necessary to make online conservatism a political force to be reckoned with.

Maybe it’s just my inexperience with the larger blogosphere, but I’ve never thought that the point of this mess of repetitive message blogs and grammar-challenged comments was to enforce our political will on the masses. Are we aiming our clinged-to guns at the Washington power elite, hoping to sway them as some sort of massive online special interest group? Is that what I’ve been writing and photoshopping about for the last two years? I certainly didn’t think it was.

This blogging game has always seemed to me to be about the people. After all, there are only so many hits that you can muster if your entire readership comes from government building IP addresses. Even if you’ve got an entire team of bureaucrats lapping up every last word you brilliantly clack out at your keyboard, is that what you’re doing it for?

I have absolutely no official campaign experience. I have no Washington connections and my media experiences are few and far between. I started writing all the swill that I’ve been selling because my mouth wasn’t big enough, and my lungs weren’t strong enough, to reach enough people by shouting out my window like I usually would have. Plus the noise violation fines were starting to pile up and monthly server costs are practically free these days.

And if we were to follow the Daily Kos model, falling into lockstep and sealing ourselves off from any dissenting opinion, is that really going to help the conservative beliefs that we have gain power? What sort of convoluted, pandering pap will that breed on the right when you consider what it’s done to a bunch of people on the left who used to be content drawing flowers and smiley faces on their backpacks between Starbucks lattes and rides on public transportation? Over the last eight years, as the left’s internet presence has grown stronger, the online representation of their base has lost its mind.

Is that what we really want? And if we do somehow manage to come together, patting each other on the back while we fill the country’s mug with milquetoast middle-of-the-road election-winning conservatism, do we really think our agenda will be that much further advanced? Let’s take a look at the most important things to the apparently all-powerful nutroots and see how well they’ve done with getting their agenda implemented.

They wanted to get out of Iraq. Hmm, nope, that didn’t work out for them. They wanted substantive investigations of the Bush administration. Last time I checked, Dick Cheney was still at large. They wanted to keep us from drilling offshore. Wrong direction there, at least temporarily. They wanted to keep the assault weapons ban. I’m pondering the purchase of a scary looking AK as we speak, so how’d that turn out?

Is that enough examples? So, yes, of course by becoming the little lockstep-walking automatons with iron mousepads and a common diluted message we could increase our influence. If we embrace whatever the RNC puts forward for us, we can definitely increase our influence, but we lose what makes this the most fun diversionary hobby I’ve ever had. (And don’t take the term hobby lightly or think that it reflects on how serious I take the political game. If one of you bigwigs would hire me, I’d much rather do it for a living. I’m just stating the case as it currently is.)

The great thing about the right side of the blogosphere today is that it is such a mash-up of ideas and ideologies. Yes, we all share some basic frameworks that make us conservatives. We have so much to bicker over as well, and I don’t want to lose that for the sake of perceived party representation in Washington. I’ve learned more from the people who I disagree with than I could have ever hoped to if we started playing purge games like the kooks did when dissatisfied Clinton voters didn’t drop into line mere moments after the primaries ended.

In other words, organization is good. Anything that gets my ill-informed opinion to more people who might be inclined to agree with it is good. If it gets our heavy-hitters out there for the base to soak up, good. But disregarding the national issues that people across the country actually care about and want to chime in on in order to whip the grass-roots into shape over district number whathaveyou? No. I’ll gladly be kept to my little slice of obscurity with my (sometimes) funny pictures before this becomes something slavish. That isn’t what we need to prosper.

We didn’t need the MSM to win elections before, we don’t need homogenization of the blogosphere to win readers now.