Following up the last post — Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog has a good commentary on the same Krugman post. As Steve says, blaming the rise of the Right on racism alone misses a whole lot of other elements of the story.
However, I do think the Right’s phobia of taxes (apparently we’re supposed to pay for government by holding a lot of bake sales) can be traced very directly to a racist backlash against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, and taxes are a particular concern for Professor Krugman.
Anyway, with all that in mind, I want to point to an article by a conservative on what’s wrong with conservatism. Unlike most of the conservative articles I point to, this one actually has some decent insight into what went wrong and what conservatives have to do to be politically viable going forward.
Having decided Barack Obama won the election because of his campaign’s smart use of technology — which certainly was a plus — Republicans are putting forward a program to do the same thing on the Right.
Julian Sanchez writes,
They’re [Republican online strategists] proposing an ambitious goal of recruiting 5 million new online activists and insisting on a new openness that better integrates distributed grassroots efforts. …
… I wonder whether there isn’t a broader technofetishism at work here. It’s not that they shouldn’t be thinking about how to do online organizing as well as the Obama team did, but at times the impulse to focus on modernizing tactics and strategy makes me think of the Microsoft execs convinced that the right ad campaign will finally convince people they love Vista.
Conservatism has much bigger problems right now than a paucity of Twitter skills.
In other words, sounding the same old dog whistles with new technology is not going to bring back the Reagan Revolution.
Front and center is that the end of the Cold War and a governing party that made “small government” a punchline has left it very much unclear what, precisely, “conservatism” means. The movement was always a somewhat uneasy coalition of market enthusiasts and social traditionalists, defined at least as much by what (and who) they opposed as by any core common principles. The Palin strategy—recapturing that oppositional unity by rebranding the GOP as the party of cultural ressentiment—is just a recipe for a death spiral. Conservatives don’t need to figure out how to promote conservatism on Facebook; they need to figure out what it is they’re promoting. To the extent that a new media strategy is part of opening up that conversation, great, but it had better not become a substitute for engaging in some of that painful introspection.
The GOP hasn’t “rebranded” themselves as the party of cultural ressentiment, of course. That’s what it has been for a very long time. It’s just that the elements of the Right most enamored of the ressentiment stuff is about the only part making any noise right now.
Julian Sanchez continues with his argument that technology alone will not save the GOP, pointing out that many on the Left most associated with progressive ascendancy (e.g., Eli Pariser, Markos Moulistas) are not techies themselves. Technology is only useful when it is in the hands of people who are politically savvy about using it.
This paragraph I find fascinating:
Finally, and perhaps a bit more contentiously, “openness” is a double-edged sword. There is, frankly, a lot of crazy out there—and a vocal chunk of the rightroots apparently under the illusion that McCain’s big lost opportunity was the failure to make sufficient hay of Bill Ayers and amateur forensic analyses of Barack Obama’s birth certificate. This, again, is a recipe for death spiral. What gets lost in the “bottom-up versus top-down” frame is that the left has managed a more useful symbiosis between their grassroots and their intellectuals. What seems to be playing out on the right of late, by contrast, is a frenzy of mutual demonization. Pace some of my progressive friends, I don’t think the recent flurry of activity in the fever swamps reveals any deep, eternal truths about conservatism per se; it’s just what’s filled the gap created by the paucity of useful leadership from conservative intellectuals. What’s needed right now is less tactical refinement, and more conversation about the agenda tactics are supposed to serve.
Put another way, if there was a right-wing Daily Kos, set up with exactly the same platform, how would it not turn into an upgraded Free Republic?
“What gets lost in the “bottom-up versus top-down” frame is that the left has managed a more useful symbiosis between their grassroots and their intellectuals.” This sentence requires some examination. Who are the grassroots? Who are the intellectuals? On the Left, that line is blurry. What technology enabled is that the grassroots/intellectual part of the Left finally found a way to communicate with each other, and then with the political leaders of the Democratic Party.
Ten years ago, we were nearly entirely shut out of the nation’s political discourse. The only voices one heard in mass media were Right, Far Right, Foaming at the Mouth Right, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and sometimes Al Gore. Al probably was one of us at heart, but in 2000 he didn’t run as himself but as Generic Political Candidate As Determined By Focus Groups because no one knew we were here.
It was, finally, through pioneering websites like Bartcop, Buzzflash, and the late great Media Whores Online (moment of silence to show respect) that we liberal grassroots/intellectual types began to find each other and communicate with each other. And from there, we began to challenge the Democratic Party status quo as well as the Right. So far, the result are mixed, but I do believe we are having an impact.
Yes, the Left has its share of crazies, but for the most part the Left Blogosphere has pushed a progressive agenda within the tradition of the New Deal. In other words, we are about where the mainstream of American thought used to be. Elements of the far Left — Marxists, anarchists, International A.N.S.W.E.R. — show up at protests but have been invisible on the Left Blogosphere. The exception are Truthers, but many of us have banned Truthers from our sites because we don’t want them sucking all the air out of the progressive movement.
The point is, though, that the grassroots/intellectual Left used technology to organize, form messages, and get the attention of Dem Party leaders. Few in the Dem Party were making an effort to cultivate us, except to take our money. We had to organize ourselves and crash the gates.
Now, let’s look at the Right. Is there a mass of moderate conservatives out there in grassland country using technology to talk to each other, organize, and challenge the status quo of the Republican Party? If there is, I haven’t seen it. Much of the push from the Right to make better use of technology is coming from Republican online strategists, not from the grassroots masses. Does the Right even have a “grassroots” that is appreciably different from the people who frequent Free Republic, Little Green Footballs and Power Tools?
Who are the Right’s intellectuals? I mean, the real intellectuals, not the ones like Hannity or Coulter who keep rewriting the book How Liberals Are Godless and Hate America and Want to Eat Your Children. David Brooks? Bill Kristol? Please.
I think Julian Sanchez is absolutely right when he says that conservatives need to stop thinking about tactics and message and instead think honestly about what it is they represent. I suggest they start with some honest thinking about what government is and what it is for. And maybe also what the word “conservatism” means. Maybe out there somewhere there are people who are thinking about how to apply conservative principles to effective governance on a more practical level than “drown it in a bathtub.” If so, that’s where the next conservative wave is likely to originate.
Sanchez ends his essay:
The dangerous temptation right now, especially for a party in the minority, is to seek to recapitulate the Cold War coalition model through oppositional self-definition, when something more robust is called for.
Right now most of the Right is falling back to the attack dog positions they held during the Clinton Administration. That seems to be all they know how to do. Something more robust is called for, indeed. I’m not holding my breath.
