A Parliament Of Grasshoppers

I’ve been blogging for seven and a half years; I was a couple of years ahead of the “fad” curve, for once in my life.

And when it comes to political blogs, I think the various blog cultures reflect their owners.  Liberals, being primarily herd creatures, are very hierarchical in their blogging; if you follow a lot of leftyblogs (and I do), you can almost see the memes starting with Kos and Atrios and the Huffpo, and work their way down through the ranks (and I use the term “ranks” intentionally).  Conservatives, being basically decentralized (one could almost say “rudderless”, at times in the past half-decade) have approach blogging in a much less organized way – but the underlying current among conservative blogs has been less to serve as a political engine than as a form of “samizdat” alternative media to outflank what conservatives perceive (correctly) to be the bias and in-the-bag nature of the mainstream media.  That is, of course, a much more scattered approach.

And for people who make their living at this, it’s a distinction that matters.

Of course, the mainstream media is the last group of people that can really understand that, but when organizations like CNN try to write about the subject:

“While it is obvious the progressive blogosphere is superior, we are being out-organized on Twitter,” said Gina Cooper, a blogger who helped organize Netroots Nation, an annual gathering of online liberal activists that met last week in Pittsburgh. “There is some catching up to do on the progressive side.”

It took me a moment push  my skull back into my head when I read that – but once I did, it made sense, in context (where “context” means “with the parameters of the discussion shoved into a nearly meaningless corner”).  Liberal bloggins is superior, as a medium for delivering votes to Democrats.  Until the likes of the Center for “Independent” Media and other “Progressive” groups started pouring money into leftyblogging, either directly or via providing cushy full-time blogging jobs for leading leftybloggers, the lefty blogosphere was a morass of banal, unfocused, Bush-deranged rage.  With money and leadership, the leftysphere became a tightly focused array of banal, Bush-deranged rage aimed at raising money and turning out voters.

Of course, in the leftyphere focuses on opinion and organization, not on serious analysis or reporting.  There is no leftyblog analog to, say, Powerline’s shredding of Dan Rather’s hit piece on President Bush’s Air National Guard record.

But viewed purely as organizing?  The piece has a point.  For conservatives, the blogosphere is largely a replacement for the morning newspaper. Most of us are not fundemantally politcal people – we want government out of our lives, not at the center.  So keeping our “organizing” down to 140 characters or less makes perfectly good sense.

Of course, being CNN, there has to be a certain aspect of “they have now idea what they’re talking about” endemic in the piece: 

“Twitter is a news funnel,” she said. “Conservatives are very tightly knit and getting their message out very well.”

“Conservatives are tightly knit?”  That, of course, is madness.  At this juncture in American history, “conservative” is about as meaningful as, say, “caucasian”; just as any descriptor that covers everything from Icelandic people to Berbers, from Slavs to Spaniards is basically so broad as to be meaningless, so “conservative” is today.  Any label that covers the fiscal moderate but evangelical pro-life Mike Huckabee and the tax and immigration hawk Tom Tancredo, or the fiscal conservative but socially pragrmatic Tim Pawlenty, lacks a certain degree of focus.

But the piece has a point; whatever conservatives lack these days in terms of ideological congruency, we are (finally) making up, after two slack cycles, in paying attention and waking up and smelling the coffee and getting out and into politics again, not because of but in spite of the leadership we’ve had – or lacked – in the past six years or so.

And – hopefully – realizing that no matter what your key issue, having any conservative in office, even a conservative that is imperfect on your pet issue, is going to be a better bet than having even the “best ” (hypothetical) Democrat.

The conservative twittersphere is more than adequate – as the article notes – in saying “show up” and “send money”.  As to the “why?”

Well, for that we still have the long-form blog.  And at that, the CNN piece notwithstanding, the conservative blogosphere still excels alone.

14 thoughts on “A Parliament Of Grasshoppers

  1. “Conservatives, being basically decentralized”

    Wow, you sure wouldn’t know it from watching ’em parrot all the same nonsensical catch phrases, picked up from Chairman Rush and FAUX News, at townhall meetings across the country.

    Of course it’s hard to have a hierarchy when what you’re doing is racing to the bottom. Maybe a lowerarchy?

  2. Mitch wrote:
    ““Conservatives are tightly knit?” That, of course, is madness. At this juncture in American history, “conservative” is about as meaningful as, say, “caucasian”; just as any descriptor that covers everything from Icelandic people to Berbers, from Slavs to Spaniards is basically so broad as to be meaningless, so “conservative” is today. Any label that covers the fiscal moderate but evangelical pro-life Mike Huckabee and the tax and immigration hawk Tom Tancredo, or the fiscal conservative but socially pragrmatic Tim Pawlenty, lacks a certain degree of focus.”

    Did I miss something, or were you not just recently promoting the premise that the majority of people are actually conservative, on the basis of some recent poll? So… now you are saying that the term conservative is functionally meaningless? How can you have it both ways?

  3. It’s priceless that Angry Clown wrote ‘Chairman Rush’ and ‘FAUX news’ in a comment meant to imply that conservatives all read from the same page.
    No one could self-parody themselves like that with complete unawareness. What a droll fellow!

  4. Apples and shopping carts.

    As I noted last week, more people than not ARE conservative to one degree or another.

    “Conservative” is far from meaningless; quite the opposite, it has many, many meanings. How DOES one reconcile a term that includes Geoge Will and Rush Limbaugh; Michael Savage and Michael Medved; Mitt Romney and Tom Tancredo; The National Chamber of Commerce and the National Rifle Association; the Cato Institute and the Pro Life Action League; John McCain and Ron Paul; Southern Baptists and PJ O’Rourke; Tim Pawlenty and John Kyl; Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza; the Minnesota Free Market Foundation and Norm Coleman?

    Note that each couplet is composed of people who are more or less vastly different from each other, in some cases diametrically in terms of focus and, in some cases, ideology itself; yet every one is a conservative in some key, definitive facet. Anyone calling themself a conservative or a Conservative – indeed, according to the poll I cited, more Americans in general than not – will likely resonate with one or more of the above, and quite probably disagree violently with one or more as well.

    See the conundrum?

  5. I haven’t listened to Rush since he refused to defend Savage and I watch FNC mainly for entertainment. My “hard” news source is Drudgereport and RealClearPolitics.com with a little CNN.com thrown in there (its our homepage). We don’t get our talking points from anyone, most of us have the ability to come up with our own, unlike the left.

  6. Mitch wrote:
    “Anyone calling themself a conservative or a Conservative – indeed, according to the poll I cited, more Americans in general than not – will likely resonate with one or more of the above, and quite probably disagree violently with one or more as well.

    See the conundrum? ”

    I DO see the conundrum; and the end result is that many of these labels are effectively meaningless.

    You would probably call me liberal, I self-identify as independent, and on many subjects others would deem me as strongly conservative – like being strongly pro-firearm, pro-2nd ammendment.

    Instead of trying to apply labels, and trying to pigeonhole who people are or what they think, I don’t think there is any useful substitute for just plain taking people as individuals and skipping the various flavors of name calling / labeling/ tagging them or grouping them.

    The people you describe as resonating with conservatives have NOT overall voted as if that represented their feelings in the past three election cycles, and arguably they have voted less conservatively and certainly less GOP by many definitions. If you have people agreeing with some but also disagreeing, particularly violently disagreeing with others inclusive in your definitions, the definitions aren’t working. Which more than anything underlines the inadequacy of trying to categorize people. I would suggest to you that those categories are really not very helpful OR necessary. It is enough to address specific ideas.

  7. “I don’t think there is any useful substitute for just plain taking people as individuals and skipping the various flavors of name calling / labeling/ tagging them or grouping them”

    Classification is “name calling”? No, I don’t think so. Sounds like a thought exercise gone wrong.

  8. Terry wrote:
    Classification is “name calling”? No, I don’t think so. Sounds like a thought exercise gone wrong. ”

    Classification is only that when the term means something that is more clearly defined and agreed upon – taxonomic classification as an example. If it is a term that is so very widely applied differently, without unanimity, and further, the terms largely serve only as a pejorative for people to use towards others (a use, but hardly a function) – yes, it is name calling and not classification.

  9. I was going to come up with a response to DG’s last, but Troy basically covered it.

    “Conservative” is like “European”; a useful high-level classification, but with many lower-level varieties that make generalizations dicey.

  10. Interesting how 99.7% of “conservative” Americans are “European”-Americans.

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