(Via
Glenn Greenwald) From
the Anti-Idiotarian Rotweiler (emphasis mine):
Try doing anything to those mutilating darlings of the Supremes in order to extract life-saving intel from them, and then wait for the Supreme Whores to decide that you were "humiliating" them in doing so.
Five ropes, five robes, five trees.
Some assembly required.
Now, why did I have to spend the last month going through endless process stories with the media about such mundane things as Advertise Liberally, my Act Blue page, the Townhouse list, and BlogPac, while the media establishment ignores the increasingly frequent calls to violence within the right-wing blogosphere? Here are some lessons I've learned while looking for an answer to that question:
- 1. The political and media establishment doesn't care about the right-wing blogosphere. Now, I don't really care either, so I don't blame them. The right-wing blogosphere has comparatively little influence within the conservative movement and the Republican Party as the progressive netroots have within the progressive movement and the Democratic Party. They also have a significantly smaller audience, and the media clearly is not obsessed with them to nearly the same degree they are obsessed with us. The conservative movement does not need them, and basically they have very little impact on the national discourse. So people generally don't care.
- 2. The right-wing is able to get anything it wants into the national news media. Case in point: it becomes national news that a pathetic blogger who never had more than 100 visitors to her blog in a single day before this week threatens a mid-level right-wing blogger in the comments section of said right-wing blog. For the sake of comparison, the Anti-Idiotarian Rotweiler has had more than 5.4 million visits in its history, yet it is doubtful that their call to lynch five Supreme Court justices will ever see the light of day outside the blogosphere.
- 3. The conservative movement contains a bottomless pit with the need to feel victimized. That the entire right-wing blogosphere is so eager to point out what an extremely low-traffic left-wing blogger said about another blogger strikes me as utter desperation to feel victimized for anyone for anything. Not that there aren't people on the left who desire to feel victimized as well (see my rant on the subject here), but this is really a case of pathetic stretching.
- 4. The right-wing blogosphere and netroots are only useful to the conservative movement and only successful in so far as they replicate established conservative political tactics and support established conservative means of information distribution. There isn't a single new tactic or idea to be found in the conservative blogosphere and netroots. Even the Thune bloggers were simply doing what the right has done for decades: complain about supposed left-wing bias in the media. With each passing month, I become more and more convinced of what Matt and I wrote for the New Politics Institute last year
Conservatives use the same tactics on blogs that they do in mainstream politics - attack the media and attack progressives. The right wing tends not to build independent online communities, using their existing offline communities to generate web sites that reinforce their politics and their ideology.
Their web presence is nurtured by institutions and is part of the conservative, right-wing media machine. The Drudge Report, for instance, is one of the largest conservative sites and frequently receives its information from Republican operatives.
Most right-wing blogs reiterate talking points that are generated from inside formal conservative institutions; conversations center on feeling victimized for being right-wing, attacking and hating progressives, and attacking and hating the media.
The right-wing netroots and blogosphere are just more of the same right-wing machine that has developed over the past few decades, only less effective and generally marginal. This could explain why the establishment doesn't care about them, and why the media does not find them interesting.
Now, as Peter Daou emphasized on our "Blog Theory" panel at Yearly Kos, this all isn't to say that the right-wing blogosphere and netroots aren't effective. In the end, they accomplish what the conservative movement needs them to accomplish: more of the same. They are effective in the way that they are needed to be effective, even if that doesn't mean a whole lot. While it could, and should, be argued that what the Republican Party really needs right now is a grassroots movement to form new communities and leaders that will challenge the extremist conservative movement for control of the Republican Party, in the end I don't think there really are enough Republicans left in the Chafee-Whitman-Anderson-Rockerfeller mode for such a movement to feed off any real natural base. That wing of the Republican Party is dead, so we shouldn't expect the right-wing netroots and blogosphere to really be anything except a continuation of the radical conservative movement. Perhaps a time will come in a decade or so when the progressive movement has gained such power in America that the conservative movement will need new leaders and tactics in order to remain competitive, but we are not at that point yet. Until we are, don't expect any innovation or condemnation of calls to lynch federal officials on the right. As things stand, the right-wing netroots will remain generally marginal, out-of-sight, and repetitive.
