Truth Out Loud

August 06, 2005

Progressive Vs Conservative Political Blogosphere Delusions

Chris Bowers over at MyDD has an interesting but completely self absorbed analysis of the various strengths and weaknesses of the Progressive and Conservative blogosphere. Lets take a look one by one.

On the Progressive side we have.

• Website investment. Progressive bloggers have been extremely innovative in developing and implementing website software that produces more flexible, interactive, attractive, and powerful websites from which to run their blogs than have their conservative counterparts.
  

This is what is called Scoop worship. The progressive side of the blogosphere has plowed a lot of time, money and effort into developing this software to support their community approach to blogging (meaning multiple bloggers at the same location). The features are excellent but the centrally controlled community approach is the problem.

• Intra-blog communities (same as previous link). Progressive blogs allow for greater interactivity with bloggers on their websites, including more comments, diaries, polls, requests for feedback, and chatting features that allow for the creation of comparatively stronger communities within many individual progressive blogs.

This is true but what they fail to realize is that this is the problem. The communities are too tight and tightly controlled. They are too tightly controlled because there is a segment of this community that looses all sense of reality.

• Partisanship. Progressive blogs are far more likely to identify with the Democratic Party than conservative bloggers are to identify with the Republican Party. This leads to greater contact between progressive bloggers and the Democratic Party than conservative bloggers have with the Republican Party. It also means more influence.
  

While I agree that the Progressive blogs identify themselves more as democrats I do not agree that this necessarily leads to influence. While that may change one day for now there is still a huge gap between the netroots and the grassroots of the Democratic Party. This is easily seen in the constant battles the netroots have with establishment democrats. The netroots is just a small loud segment of the democratic base that is demanding to be heard out of all proportion of it's numbers just like the other special interests that they complain about. Dean was the netroots first success and it was against the wishes of traditional democrats, not Republicans. I am willing to bet establishment democrats are loosing sleep over how to get the netroots to go away like a loud whiny kid that keeps embarrassing you in public.

• Activism. By every measure of political activism, progressive blog readers and bloggers are more politically active than their conservative counterparts. Progressive bloggers also engage in far more direct electoral activism than conservative bloggers, who engage in very little.
  

This is probably a fair statement if you leave out blogging itself as activism.

• Meritocracy (same as previous link). New progressive blogs are more likely to become "A-list" blogs than are new conservative blogs. Half of the highest trafficked progressive blogs (top ten) were founded within the last sixteen months--by comparison, most "A-list" conservative blogs are noticeably older. Also, the "recommended diary" feature on many progressive blogs allows the community to decide what posts receive more attention, rather than just the "A-list" blogger "elite."
  

Meritocracy in this context is a euphemism for worthy. On the conservative side the market decides, you write crap people don't read you. In the Progressive communities you write crap no one reads you, others in the community shout you down and if your really lucky you get banned. The problem is that if you don't parrot the community wisdom or play amen corner to the community powers you can suffer the same fate. Seeing as how the progressive blogs are tight communities this could leave you frozen out of the discussion all together. I cannot count the times I have seen die hard liberals get whacked by their fellows on progressive blogs just for criticizing their own candidates. At least on Conservative blogs you have to be vulgar, racist or abusive to get banned. On progressive blogs that’s a plus when addressing your opponents faults.

On the Conservative side we have.

• Local focus. Conservative blogs are more likely to take a local focus than progressive blogs, and to create strong, local blog rings.
  

This is probably true. I notice that many conservative bloggers address local issues even though their audience may be global.

• Integration with Republican message machine. Republican blogs are better able to influence stories in the MSM due to their better integration with existing forms of conservative, alternative media and the Republican Noise Machine in general.
  

This is total paranoid nonsense. I am still trying to find my Republican noise machine access. In fact I get a good portion of my inspiration from democrats and progressive blogs. Well that is unless progressive blogs are part of the Republican noise machine too. Wonder if Carl Rove is behind that.

• Inter-blog communities. Conservative blogs have a tendency to link to discussions on other blogs more often than progressive blogs.
  

This is true. But we link to Progressive blogs a lot as well. That’s were we get the funniest stuff.

• Free media. Despite their smaller audience size, conservative blogs receive far more laudation from established media outlets than their progressive counterparts. This includes more interviews and more airtime on "inside the blogs" segments. This is almost certainly related to their integration with the Republican Noise Machine.
  

This is true. This is more likely because non bloggers see the leader of community blogs as the "blogger" and any diarists as just the equivalent of a commenter. While on the conservative side most run their own blogs. Traditional media want to talk to the blogger in charge not the troops so naturally this gives a huge advantage to conservatives. Where the heck is that Republican noise machine I keep hearing about? I know it has to be around here somewhere if they keep mentioning it.

As a rule I love reading Chris analysis because I get a good idea what progressives think about themselves. About half of what he discovers is interesting. If he could ever find the time to remove the Progressive chip from his shoulder he might be able to come up with something useful as well. I note Chris and a few others are going for the big money.

Thus, along with a few other bloggers, I am going to have to try and open up a lot of funding to get these plans moving. For community and Blogads-funded political newbies such as myself, the world of big donors is difficult new territory into which I am about to venture.

Once the big money starts rolling in who will then be in charge?

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Posted by Sid at 01:07 AM | Comments (0) | Blogosphere