The chief fuel of the Nixon thesis has always been righteous indignation.
It’s created from the top-down, by elites, by experts. It’s then passed down to the masses, through a compliant media (or blogosphere) and becomes conventional wisdom.
The rise of the Netroots in 2003 reversed this process. The Internet provided a means by which righteous indignation could flow from the bottom-up.
That model is now threatened. By math.
DailyKos and MyDD used their first-mover advantages wisely. They scaled into full-blown communities. They are no more blogs today than AOL is a blog. Other liberal bloggers built group blogs, and eventually even "star" individuals like Atrios brought in assistants.
The predictable result is that the number of voices being heard is shrinking. The top guys are telling newcomers to either specialize (get a tiny audience) or join the groups (become a subsidiary.)
There is no condemnation here, real or implied. This is all a product of math. We have seen it before, in every conceivable Internet niche. The first mover gets a major advantage, and while they can be overhauled, this takes more-and-more effort over time, until in a few years a status quo develops. We saw it in browsers, in ecommerce, in search engines. It’s the way business works.
But this is the crisis for the Netroots. It’s no longer really offering a bottom-up political revolution. My best efforts will no longer get a fraction of the attention Markos Moulitsas gets by just coughing. I’m not complaining. It’s not my problem.
It’s his. Because if you’re to build a movement on the premise of bottom-up action, then you have to put a major effort into maintaining bottom-up opportunity. You have to invest a large and growing portion of your time and effort into seeking out and promoting new voices. You’ve got to go from being a writer to a publisher to a publishing house of the old school, the kind that actually "broke" authors and didn’t just bid-up TV celebrities then hire some flunky to do the book.
Such a bottom-up approach is necessary because, without it, liberalism becomes an echo chamber no better, and frankly no different, than the 40-year old Far Right echo chamber it’s trying to replace. The challenge Markos faces with this year’s YearlyKos event in Chicago is much, much greater than what he faced last year in Las Vegas. You can expect a lot more gate-crashers, both sane and insane, a major effort by the other side to spin the whole thing as loony, and an enormous number of wannabes approaching the Holy Shrine of the Netroots, looking for their 15 minutes of fame.
Which is why I’ve switched this blog, and will henceforth try to "own" a beat and a story I consider to be important and intellectually fashion-forward, the War Against Oil.
But before leaving the study of politicians, let’s study the other echo chamber a minute.
Righteous indignation is a delicate fuel. Burn too little and your
troops fall asleep. Burn too much and you can destroy yourself.
How do you know when you’ve got it right? You test, test and test
some more. This is the discipline of direct mail, where a 2% response
rate is success. Different letters are sent to groups of subscribers,
and those which perform best are sent to everyone. In the case of the
Web, you test the results of every blog post you pull up from the
bottom of the stack, and do more of what works.
That’s what the right is in the process of doing, dropping what
doesn’t work and testing new forms of righteous indignation. Those who
created the Bush Administration are now actively denying their
responsibility, pretending that Bush isn’t a "real" conservative (much
as Khruschev condemned Stalin) so they can claim to be out of power,
and come to their new scams with clean hands.
The world’s leading expert in this is Richard Viguerie.
(That’s him to the left, hands on hips, from a book he wrote about building the New Right early in the 1980s, from his salad days.) Viguerie has been at this for over 40 years. His specialty was direct
mail, which could say whatever it felt like yet still fly under
reporters’ radar. This is how hate really became mainstreamed, but the
technique was then copied by a host of liberal organizations (Moveon.org is just a more sophisticated version of the scam) turning manufactured indignation into a going industry.
In the Internet age, and with Bush now wildly unpopular, Viguerie has had to change both his tactics and his strategy.
Here’s a good example of how he is adapting. It’s called GrassrootsFreedom. This claims to be a grassroots movement against Internet political regulation. It’s not. This
is Viguerie, engaged in trying to guarantee the precise opposite of
what he claims. What he’s trying to do is ensure that his raft of
Astroturf groups (corporate-paid interests) don’t have to disclose
their actual sponsorship, when they launch blogs and who knows what
all, ostensibly aimed at supporting various issues but in fact aimed at
building Viguerie’s mailing list business, and making him more
important to his corporate clients.
Debunking, and disproving, the attempts of the people who brought us
to this crisis should be an important sub-set of what the Netroots’ own
echo chamber does. Watching how the constant dumping on Ann Coulter has
caused her one-time acolyte Michelle Malkin to try and stick a stake in her economic heart is a good sign of progress.
But there is much more to do. And the Netroots has, unfortunately,
only one channel to use, since people have only one political ear to
hear it. (They reserve the other for the other side.) It’s how people
like Moulitsas use this power that will determine the future of the
movement. Let’s hope he does more than become this era’s Viguerie.
