It isn’t the digital divide that most people refer to, but there has been a traditional advantage for Democrats in their willingness and ability to use online tools. The way I’ve generally thought about this is to compare it to theater and the arts. How many Republicans do you encounter who work as prop-artists or set designers? How many conservative painters are there? The vast majority of truly creative people are liberal in their outlook, especially on social issues. You do see the occasional Republican actor or comedian, but they serve to remind us how truly isolated they are (and, generally, how untalented and unfunny).
Creative use of the internet isn’t much different than any other creative endeavor. So, Republicans are late adopters and their use is mainly derivative and second-rate. I mean, look at the conservative blogosphere. Do they have attractive, innovative web designs?
You mock, but this is why they’re so much better at propaganda than liberals are. They don’t worry about being creative – they worry about repeating the same line over and over and over again. And their audience eats it up because they prefer repetition to novelty as well.
Look at Limbaugh’s show – 3 decades of the same thing over and over and over again with new names penciled into place. Or anything on Fox News – same thing. Repetition – and an audience who eats that repetition up.
Honestly I think that Fox News does so well because syndicated reruns have basically disappeared. If we had channels that were running old Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Andy Griffith and Father Knows Best re-runs 24×7, I think Fox News would face some pretty stiff competition. (TVLand is too obsessed with their own original programming to count – even if it often seems repetitive it’s still not as comfortable as re-runs of shows that have already been watched).
Actually, they’re more effective at propaganda because they self-consciously engage in propaganda. We don’t.
The Right is always going to have an advantage in the messaging game, for several reasons. First, their target audience is not well-informed and clued in to civics the way liberals are. They are far more receptive to angry rants and class warfare tactics.
Second, if you’re trying to market racism and sexism and xenophobia and hate and other negatives, it’s a far easier job. Pushing those buttons in the human psyche is a lot less challenging than appealing to the higher instincts that form the basis of liberalism.
I don’t know what to do about this problem– it’s not an easy nut to crack.
People forget that in the earlier days of the Internet (circa 2000-02), conservatives had a significant online advantage. Certainly the right blogosphere was up and running a couple years before left sites like MyDD and then DKos started to get traction. And that’s for the simple reason that the R’s put money into it, and the D’s didn’t. The early left blogosphere was almost entirely a phenomenon of initially unpaid agitators who were passionate about politics. The righties had a lot more paid pundits (think Malkin) and institutional support.
By 2003-4, disgust with Bush and grass roots populism allowed the left to overtake the right in the blogosphere, and Dean popularized the online donation and campaign organizing strategies that are now so central to politics. But the Republicans can always throw more money at it, and in an era when the right’s base is mobilized (as it is now), there’s no reason to assume a permanent structural advantage for progressives.
The one thing progs have in our favor is youth. Tech apps, as they evolve, are used and understood most thoroughly by people who tend not to be Republicans. That’s also the history of social networks so far. But Republicans can hire young programmers as easily as we can.
There is in my experience a fundamental difference in philosophy about how progressive sites run and how right-wing sites run. Right-wing sites see their purpose as distributing the official talking points of the right-wing, and the Republican Party in particular. There is no equivalent on the right of independent (of the Democratic Party line) progressive sites that have spirited disagreements over the direction of the progressives and the relationship between progressives and the Democratic Party.
And when you get to social media like Twitter the difference is starker. Consider the tweets in the #wiunion hash tag during the protests in Madison. The right-wing tweets were canned, repetitive and too clever by half. The progressive tweets were reports on what was happening, links to established progressive blogs, and to local news and blogs.
There is a major difference in the top-down messaging of the right and the bottom-up messaging of progressives.
And it really doesn’t have much to do with how much artistic flair went into the web design or how much the site is implemented with AJAX technology or how aesthetic it is. Two of the classic progressive sites demonstrate this clearly: Atrios’s Eschaton and Digby’s Hullabaloo. The content and the writing carry both of these sites.
They’re nailing us. They have the advantage of tons of cash and think tanks that can employ squadrons of web-surfers in an effort to hijack the online discourse in a way that our side is both unwilling and unfunded to reproduce. How many times have I read a left-leaning blogger or heard a radio personality remarking on just this disparity of resources? It’s not just whining, it’s an observation of blatant truth.
Look at what the right wing online squad is getting away with on Wikipedia. The right has the resources to pay for these efforts; the left relies on individual initiative, which isn’t lacking by any means, but by definition is entirely uncoordinated which translates in the digital world as diffuse and relatively impotent.
We need a Bircher equivalent on our side, but we’ve never had one and I don’t see the day dawning anytime soon when we could start dishing out anything resembling a response.