New Guards

"The Right has aircraft carriers, the Left has pirate ships."

The Old Guard is building more aircraft carriers. Two new groups have been announced, one composed of "House and Senate Republican lawmakers", the other "a collection of the party's senior strategists".

Because nothing says Reform like a coalition of the politicians who got the Republican Party where it is today.

The National Council To Stay Relevant for a New America intends to "hold town halls" and "produce GOP ideas".   "Let's start an organization, then figure out why later" does not inspire confidence - normally, organizations are created because somebody already has an idea - nor does their announcement letter which is a buzword salad that manages to say absolutely nothing.

They also intend to "rebrand a struggling Republican Party", which is something I think Republicans fundamentally misunderstand.   Your "brand" is not "spin you hope people believe".  Branding only works when you're focusing attention on something authentic about a product.  Republicans can't sell the brand they want to sell (limited government, responsibility, values, good defense), because those things are not authentically true of the Republican Party. 

Rebranding the Party can't be done with new Buzz Words and a shiny coat of paint.  Republicans are going to have to actually reform the Party.

Look, I really don't intend to be such a downer and I sincerely hope these organizations can do something to genuinely reform the Republican Party.  If they do, they can count me as an ally.  But the rot is deep and it's hard to see how the Old Guard will be the agent of change.

The GOP has been a Zombie Party for a long time now, and the only thing that kept it moving was a certain skill at tactical political posturing and the fact that people didn't want to believe the legacy brand of the GOP was gone.  But now, even that appearance of Republican vitality is gone.

The conservative movement is carrying the dead body around, trying to convince everybody that the movement and the GOP are doing just fine and won't you please help us stay relevant?  The Zombie Party is spending a Weekend at Bernie's.  But it's quite clear by now that the Right isn't capable of accomplishing the ideals we want to accomplish with our current policies, politicians and infrastructure, and repackaging the status quo is not how the movement and the GOP will be renewed.

The next Republican revolution will come from outside current (political and movement) leadership.  The next political leaders of the Right will be the people who reform the Republican Party.

Left organizations accused Right organizations of (gasp!) organizing, James Wolcott stumbled through a nobody I read covered the tea parties, Left media pundits giggled over one pun (repeated 1000x), and hundreds of Totally Fake protests were attended by hundreds of thousands of Totally Fake people.  The Leftosphere is pretty sure the whole thing was just Photoshop.

So, I'd say the Tea Party protests went pretty well.

But what now?   Three things.

1) Building the New Guards: Rebuilding a movement requires time, and a lot of unifying moments, stories and ideas.  If you look back at the reemergence of the Democratic party over the last 10 years, you will see a great many important points - the impeachment, the 2000 election, the Iraq war, the Dean campaign, Katrina, and many others.  There is no turning point.  There are only rallying points that slowly add up to an effective movement.  Events like the Tea Party protests give new guards a chance to coalesce and have an impact on the old guard.

2) Keep it Personal: As Dave Weigel points out, many see the protests as "an opportunity to acquire new bodies for political campaigns and new names for their mailing lists."  There is nothing wrong with that, per se, but there is a great danger with trying to redirect grassroots energy to organizational ends. The minute you email those new activists with "as a Tea Party protester, we know you will take action immediately on (something they don't care about)", you're burning those new activists.   The minute you spam your grassroots with as a conservative reader of Human Events, we believe you really want to learn more about warm blankets with sleeves, you're moving down the Movement->Business->Racket path.

We need to put a lot less energy into vertical (national) coordination of the Tea Party protesters, and a lot more into horizontal (local) coordination of the protesters.  For instance, creating email groups of local protesters would be a lot more valuable than sending them impersonal blasts from a national group.  In short, let them organize themselves, an army of entrepreneurs.

3) Pick the Fight:  Many people have pointed out that the protests don't have an agenda, a point, or a clear demand.  To some extent, this is incorrect.  As Ross Douthat says, "They're anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases".  But while "No" is often the best political position of all, a movement also needs a more positive vision and agenda.  At the moment, the Right does not have this. 

While the Right is very unhappy with the status quo, it does not yet know how to change it.  So here is the most crucial lesson of all for the Tea Party protesters and the Right's new guards: This is not about Democrats.

Sure, there are plenty of Democratic policies to which we object.  But Democrats are not the problem we can fix.  Our problems are (1) the Republican Party, (2) the status quo conservative movement, and (3) the structural incentives that make politicians and government so unaccountable.

The next leaders of the Right and the Republican Party will be the people who succeed in fighting the old guard, destroying the conservative movement's comfortable status quo, and genuinely reforming the Republican Party.  They're not going to go quietly.

The era of the printing press is ending.  The era of Wordpress is beginning.  We are all publishers now.  How can journalism survive?

Clay Shirky concludes that newspapers will die, but journalism will survive through experimentation with various business models.  He's basically correct.  I think the fundamental problem is that the return to scale is disappearing.  When you no longer need a large, granite building on Main Street, a printing press and a massive support structure to do journalism, the organizations who insist on keeping them will have to evolve or die.

So, what comes next?  Clay Shirky and Yochai Benkler both suggest various business models that may emerge (some already are).  I think we'll see the re-emergence of the ideological and partisan press - they're generally better at story-telling, because they have a story to tell - with fewer neutral/objective press organizations which can provide independent mediation for the competing claims of the partisan media organizations.  Utlimately, I think that's positive.  After all, organizations with an ax to grind are the most likely to have the fury needed to turn the wheel

Here are a few approaches I think we'll see...

• Niche Journalism: If the return to scale stops increasing at a much smaller level, then we should see those returns going to expertise, instead.  The specialization may be topical, geographic or ideological/partisan, but 1000 specialists working independently should be able to provide more value than 10 organizations each employing 100 generalists. 
• Indeed, we're already seeing this.  Talking Points Memo is doing ideological niche journalism. Ars Technica, Wired and GigaOM do technology niche journalism.  The Leaderboards at Memeorandum, Techmeme and WeSmirch are full of more good examples.
• Dynamic Journalism: Why are news stories a static product?  We're already seeing Real Time Journalism (as-it-happens reporting that creates a story arc, rather than after-the-fact reporting) from outlets like The Politico and Talking Points Memo.  That will almost certainly expand.   But the blogosphere exists, in part, because people are unsatisfied with the news, so there is room for more dynamic reporting - that is, an organization which covers a story in an almost Wikipedia-like model - updating and correcting a story as it emerges - with a team of editors and reporters collaborating (with input/feedback from the public) to create what amounts to a single "same facts" overview of a broad story.
• Non-profit Journalism: Non-profits may not earn a monetary profit, but monetary profit isn't the only ROI.  Ideological magazines (e.g., National Review, The Nation, Weekly Standard, Reason, Washington Monthly, The American Spectator, The American Prospect, Human Events, Mother Jones, The New Republic) may not earn a profit very often (or at all), but much of their value comes from the exposure and publicity they provide for ideas and information.  That has a great deal of value to many people and organizations, even if that value cannot be monetized.  I expect to see a great deal more funding of journalism by the people and organizations who want that kind of ROI. 

One final note that should concern those of us on the Right: while the Right has used the internet to expand the media criticism it had been doing for many years, the Left has been busy using the internet to build their own media infrastructure.  At this stage in the Wordpress era, the entrepreneurs have come from the Left.  The Right needs new infrastructure and new guards.  That is going to require an investment in these new business models.

Colin Delany makes a crucial point at e.politics (and techPresident) about the importance of (a) integrating new/internet/social media with the rest of the organization rather than siloing it as one department among many, and (b) treating new media as a force multiplier for existing goals.

[Former Obama new media director Joe Rospars said] his department was NOT a part of the campaign's tech team. Instead, it was coequal with communications, field/grassroots, finance, etc., and was in fact just as much a client of the technology folks as, say, the press team was.

His remark jumped out at me because it's true so rarely. More often, online organizers and online advocacy staff are put in the technology box rather than allowed to be communicators ... And online communicators are often the last people consulted when messaging and outreach strategy are being planned, when they should be a part of the process from the beginning. [...]  [I]t's not the tools, it's the people and how they're organized and directed to USE the tools.

The Obama campaign used the internet as well as they did not because they employed tools that were particularly new (database-driven field organizing, email fundraising, online video and social networking have all been around for years) but because they worked out human systems to put those tools to work effectively.

 It is important that we don't put the technology cart before the mission horse.  The internet simply changes the scale at which we can productively do things that people already want to do.   As I've written previously, the Leftosphere is not effective because they can fundraise and mobilize activists.  They are effective because they can communicate and organize people around a message.  Fundraising and activism is a product of communication and organization.

I've outlined the correct course and order for rebuilding the Right as follows. 

• ...better information organization, which helps create coalesce a movement around...
• ...the organizing agenda, out of which flows...
• ...the storyline, narrative, which motivates...
• ...the grassroots/netroots to get engaged, mobilized and donating, all of which is channeled effectively by...
• ...the infrastructure, both online and offline.

Notice that the first 3 steps are really about information organization, ideas and communication.  It's not until we get to step 4 - when people are actually motivated to do something - that new, innovative technology really becomes necessary to turn information into more tangible results.

The key: new media operations need to be service-oriented.

The internet is not an organization, full of people to direct.  It is a market, full of people who already have things they want to do. 

We need to stop approaching the internet with a "what do I want them to accomplish?" mindset.  Instead, our campaigns and infrastructure need to ask, "what do they want to accomplish and how can we help?" 

Following up on the thoughtful posts by Patrick Ruffini (here and here) and John Hawkins (and by James Joyner, Dan Riehl, Melissa Clouthier and Rick Moran), I think there are a few important points to make about this project of creating online infrastructure.  I don't specifically disagree with Patrick Ruffini, but I do think he's omitting some important points.

• Organism: A good netroots movement is not a product of financial support.   While money can help elevate important voices, the Right does not lack a general political "noise machine".   We don't need to subsidize the Chatterati.  That is exactly the opposite of organic and grassroots.
• Resources: Nevertheless, infrastructure is important, and Patrick Ruffini is right that we genuinely do have some human resource problems.  For years, this did not seem terribly important.  The offline infastructure really was sufficient.  But in 2006, a political tipping point arrived.  Suddenly, the Left's ability to message, mobilize and fundraise online became apparent and important.  In 2008, the impact of that online infrastructure has become overwhelming.  In Washington, DC, in the media and on the ground. the Left has learned how to turn an online swarm into offline results.

• Mission: And yet, what the Right really needs is not to have bloggers get comfortable with activism.  While we do have human resource problems, we can't improve the game by yelling louder.  The people who read blogs are not awaiting a blogger's call to action.  That organic energy comes from a unifying grievance and a common mission.

Don't put the cart before the horse.  The Leftosphere is not effective because they can fundraise and mobilize activists.  They are effective because they can communicate and organize people around a message.  Fundraising and activism is a product of communication and organization.

If we have the right agenda, the money and activism will happen on their own; without the right agenda, activist bloggers won't help.

It's very important to understand what the Left has been doing in recent years.  They haven't been building websites.  They have been building a Movement.

Dan RIehl argues that  "the notion that the Left's Netroots grew up organically is a bit of a myth. As I pointed out as far back as July 2006, there was big money and political professionals behind getting that really going."

He's a little bit right and wrong here.  The Left did have both organic and cultivated components. 

• The organic period (1998-2003) included the emergence of Moveon.org, Daily Kos, Atrios, MyDD and other important Left-of-Center voices (Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Kevin Drum).
• The cultivated period (2003-current) included the emergence of important infrastructure (Center for American Progress, Media Matters), as well as the integration of progressive institutions with the netroots (American Prospect, Washington Monthly, Labor Unions, etc)

Both the organic and cultivated elements were necessary to make the other really effective.  A coordinating tool (Center for American Progress/Media Matters) isn't effective without a crowd to coordinate (Kos, MyDD, Atrios).  A crowd isn't really effective without coherent, organizing ideas and information around which they can mobilize.

The Right has the crowd (although that can be improved).  We're missing the coordinating mechanisms.  But even the crowd + coordination won't work unless there is a genuinely relevant organizing agenda; ideas that touch a nerve and capture the imagination.  There is a role here for better infrastructure to be built now, but it is first about improved information delivery, story-telling and organizing, not about fundraising and mobilizing.

Without the organizing agenda, the parts are...just parts.  There is no fuel.

It's not a matter of the Right not having the money.  It's a matter of the Right not having a mission.  The political entrepreneurialism that we've seen on the Left will emerge on the Right when the Right begins to coalesce around an agenda.

UPDATE

Red State's Erick Erickson offers some important points, as well.