What Is the Conservative Alternative to Daily Kos?

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:

*  The Drudge Report is probably the most popular political Web site bar none. Matt Drudge sets the tone of MSM coverage. And yet Drudge has made clear he disdains blogs. The site looks the same as it did in 1997 (can’t argue with success I suppose). There is no interactivity on Drudge. You go there read refresh and that’s it.

*  At its height Free Republic was the Daily Kos of the right. In fact I think the stratospheric un-blog-like traffic numbers of Kos can only be explained by Kos finally filling the Free Republic void on the Left. Who could forget shenanigans like sabotaging Gore campaign conference calls with toilets flushing in the background or the cries of “Get out of Cheney’s house!” Freepers were able to move action virtually anywhere in America. If Daily Kos is the angry left Free Republic was the angry right — and we were hooked.

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.

Finally let’s look at the center-right blogosphere. Its watershed moments were 9/11 and CBS memogate. That’s reflected in our strongest core competencies — warblogging and acting as media watchdogs.

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 20000 visits a day. And the visitor gap between left and right was lower than I could remember in some time: 1.2 million to 870000 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.