Complacency Alert

I'm not sure I quite agree with this, though I can see why the diary is getting such a positive reception. Traditionally, the American newsmedia aims for objectivity yet often fails to rise above vapidity. But it's not inherently conservative, if conservatism is understood as a particular socio-political project in America. Indeed, conservative success with media has come about largely as a product of decades of careful work cultivating an alternative to mainstream media, combined with strategies to pressure journalists and take advantage of the objectivity-vapidity paradigm. The legitimacy granted to what is, as the diarist points out, actually a rather fringe ideology, is not primarily the result of a "top-down" media structure, but of a movement that had the audacity to refuse to play by the rules of what was modern American journalism.

It's certainly true that the internet has helped broaden the range of information and opinion available to Americans, and that's undoubtedly a good thing for progressives. Online communications strategies have been critical in the emergence of the new progressive era. But that's because, like the conservatives before us, we're refusing to play by the rules of a media structure from which we've been locked out for the past few decades. We're taking advantage of new technologies, and innovating.

I bring this up in part because I think that if we become too comfortable in our assumption that new communications technologies will bring us "47 consecutive" Democratic presidents, we'll experience some pretty nasty whiplash when the other side innovates right past us again. And it will happen. The only thing we can do is try to stave it off as long as possible, but getting smug pretty much guarantees it'll happen sooner rather than later.

Labels: Daily Kos, internet, movement building, technology

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:52 AM 0 comments

  Conservatism 2.0?

This is a few days old, but I wanted to bring it up anyway: Patrick Ruffini has some very interesting thoughts on Yearly Kos and its relation to the conservative movement -- past and present. Ruffini points out that, while conservatives wonder "where's our Yearly Kos?", YK itself arose out of the question among progressives: "where's our CPAC?" Any progressive will admit -- will explain at length -- that our movement was largely modeled on the one built by conservatives beginning with the Goldwater campaign (though of course we've come up with innovations of our own).

The point is pretty basic: when you're locked out of the market, you're forced to innovate. That's what conservatives did beginning in the 1950s, and it's what progressives have been doing over the last few years. However, political technologies are like any other kind, in that early adopters risk finding themselves over-invested in models that can quickly become obsolete. Ruffini is concerned about precisely such a dilemma:

The conservative analog to YearlyKos is 30 years old. The 800lb. gorillas of the conservative Web initially went online in the 1995-97 timeframe. And many have failed to innovate. They are still Web 1.0, where the Left jumped directly into Web 2.0 in the Bush years.

Ruffini goes on to describe how poorly the conservative web -- Drudge, Free Republic, the right blogosphere, et al -- is aging (it's worth reading the post for the digs at Freepers alone). Are conservatives locked into outdated technologies?

It would be one thing if we didn’t have any of these institutions, and could start from scratch just as the netroots did. My fear is that we have a bunch of institutions that still function somewhat well, but are long past their prime. With that, there is the danger we will slowly die without knowing it, as our techniques gradually lose effectiveness year after year. Just like newspaper circulation numbers. And there are a number of people on the right who are still complacent about this.

Ruffini and Soren Dayton follow on this post with a pretty good exchange, about which more later. But I think there's absolutely something to this -- after all, social institutions rely on accumulated legitimacy, which can hold them back when it's time for those institutions to reinvent themselves. This is a lesson for the left as much as for the right.

The more immediate question for A&S purposes is this: When (it's when, not if) the conservatives do manage to reinvent themselves as a "2.0" movement, what will that mean? How would such a movement look? How different might its policy preoccupations, rhetoric, and internal cohesion requirements be? Is Conservatism 2.0 in the works already?

You might say those questions are what Alien & Sedition, ultimately, is all about.

Labels: conservative futures, conservatives, movement building, Patrick Ruffini

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:12 PM 1 comments

  VRWC Nods to VLWC

At the National Review, Byron York pays tribute to YearlyKos, in a surprisingly moderate tone. Of course, he has reason to mention it: he "predicted" the rise of a "Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy" back in 2004. York quotes Markos of Daily Kos, who said at the time that York's analysis was "about 2 - 5 years too early." As he now observes, the progressive netroots -- who never had as far to go as the Goldwater conservative movementeers -- might now properly lay claim to a certain vastness. He also suggests that we've been helped along the way by Republican blunders, the war chief among them, and I don't disagree -- though I happen to think we're more in tune with the American public than are the conservatives on a pretty broad range of issues.

Anyway, to all you Kossacks in Chicago -- have a blast. Wish I could be there, but I guess I'll see you at the barricades.

Labels: Byron York, Daily Kos, movement building, progressives, Yearly Kos

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:11 PM 0 comments

  Dodd's YouTube Challenge

The Chris Dodd campaign is trying an interesting experiment with its moment in the YouTube Spotlight:



I like the media criticism in the clip, but I'm particularly impressed by the effort to use interactive technology in a more substantive way than the other campaigns are doing. Rather than encourage a faux reciprocity ("Share your opinions! Pick our campaign song!"), Dodd is seeking to get viewers constructively involved on a real issue -- asking them to video themselves contacting senators in support of the Dodd Amendment, which would mandate the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq beginning 30 days from the date of enactment.

Dodd's campaign is hoping to use the popularity of the "video response" concept to get people -- particularly young people -- actively politically engaged. It's nice to see somebody making an effort to take advantage of new technologies for movement-building and political education, as opposed to simply using them as an extension of a marketing plan.

Labels: Chris Dodd, movement building, YouTube

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 6:46 AM 0 comments

  Is Hillary Our Nixon?

My question has nothing to do with secret tapes, dirty tricks, or paranoid anti-Semitism. What I'm thinking of is a comparison to Nixon's relationship with the conservative movement.

After 2004 it became fashionable in progressive grassroots circles to portray Howard Dean as a sort of Goldwater of the left. The comparison was in many ways apt -- while Dean was in no sense an ideological radical like Goldwater, he was the early prophet and catalyst for a self-conscious movement that aimed to re-invigorate and re-partisanize a major political party -- a party that had, in recent years, drifted from its historical principles and found itself consistently wrong-footed by the opposition. After Dean's defeat, we reassured ourselves by remembering how badly Goldwater was beaten in 1964, yet how the movement he founded eventually went on to become the single most powerful political force in America.

What we don't often talk about is the fact that that movement didn't really manage to get one of its own elected until sixteen years later. Richard Nixon, meanwhile, was nobody's favorite -- and certainly not the activist base's. But he was a hard-working career insider, a skilled and determined politician, and he horse-traded his way to the nomination in 1968, defeating conservative favorite Ronald Reagan, who was judged too inexperienced really to be president.

I've been pondering this for a while, and Jerome Armstrong's frustrated ruminations on the Hillary steamroller brought it to mind again. Jerome calls the race "Hillary's to lose" and regrets both the failure of purported netroots favorite John Edwards (I like Edwards, but I don't entirely accept this premise) to gain more traction, and Barack Obama's refusal to engage the netroots in a solid partnership. I suppose if one were to draw parallels to 1968, there would be obvious points of comparison between the two Democratic fields -- you have the institutional candidate (Humphrey), the progressive activists' favorite (McCarthy), and the rock star mistrusted by those same activists (RFK).

All interesting enough. But a more instructive comparison for the progressive movement might be between Hillary and Nixon. The right wing, never particularly fond of Nixon, turned on him with a vengeance after he had been in office for a couple of years. If we wind up with a President Hillary, the progresssive grassroots/netroots could find itself in a similar state. After all we've done, why are we going back to this? Why are we going back to Bill Clinton and triangulation? Echoes of: Why are we going back to Eisenhower and Keynesianism and internationalism? What really makes the parallel amusingly complete is how Hillary's right-wing enemies, like Nixon's on the left, see her as the embodiment of extremism, while her own party's activists view her as little more than a self-interested centrist.

It's only a general comparison, but it's worth considering. I still would like to see the question of "what is the netroots" problematized, and also to see that question framed within a broader examination of "what is the progressive movement?" Conservatives do this sort of exercise all the time, and I think it's good for them. We may find that the grassroots this time around is not so much weak as it is divided. Either way, though, if we do wind up nominating nobody's favorite centrist insider, we might remember that history says such setbacks are by no means fatal.

Labels: Democrats, Hillary Clinton, movement building, progressives, Richard Nixon

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:39 AM 5 comments

  On Staying Power

There are one or two more installments left in the "new new right" series. Meanwhile I want to highlight a comment by Undercover Blue (of the excellent eponymous blog) on the last post, on some of the implications of the study of movement-building, and its relationship to party campaigns, for progressives:

What old-guard Democrats count on is that progressives will live down to their reputation, i.e., cranky, inexperienced upstarts who show up just long enough to try to ram their agenda down everyone else's throats, but who don't show when there's real grunt work to be done; who will take their balls and go home the first time they don't get what they want or get their issue the attention they KNOW it deserves. Establishment Democrats count on that. And when progressives leave, the old guard gets back control of its comfy social club and nothing changes.

Why aren't progressives taken seriously? Because the old guard expects them to be a passing fad with no staying power. Until they prove they have it, they'll never be taken seriously.

The secret to building a progressive critical mass capable of reforming and reinvigorating the Democratic party is showing up day after day and outlasting the traditionalists.

I don't think I could say it any better than that.

Labels: movement building, progressives, Undercover Blue

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 6:35 AM 0 comments

  Looking for the New New Right (Part 2)

The exchange between Patrick Ruffini and Soren Dayton begins with the question of whether the GOP needs a new conservative movement equivalent to the post-Dean campaign grassroots mobilization on the left. Dayton suggests it does.

Ruffini agrees, arguing that the once-formidable conservative precinct operation has atrophied:

One of the reasons I haven’t always identified 100% with “the conservative movement” is that said movement as we primarily know it primarily exists in D.C. office buildings and no longer does a lot of grassroots shoeleather work. (Groups like FreedomWorks with actual outside-D.C. presences are largely the exception.) Walk into a student workshop at CPAC, and they’ll still be telling you to read Hayek and Mises, which 1) isn’t very practical, and 2) is pretty much what we’ve been telling our young for 40 years.

One of the reasons why the Republican Party’s 72 Hour plan was such a revolution was the conservatives hadn’t really done much precinct organizing in a sophisticated fashion since the Goldwater campaign (with the possible exception of the Christian Right in the ’70s and ’80s). Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm is said to be canonical for the Left in building its new progressive infrastructure, but the Right could stand to re-learn the lesson of how campaign manager Cliff White planned the takeover of the Party state-by-state, county-by-county in the years leading up to 1964. Even in losing, the Goldwater campaign paid a great deal of attention to organizing at the precinct level.

Ruffini's pessimistic picture is interesting, given how in 2004 Republicans ran proverbial circles around the Democrats when it came to precinct-level organizing in key states like Ohio.

But as I've suggested, organizing technologies and strategies, while important, do not constitute a movement. And Ruffini understands that something's missing:

Even then, the question is what does a new conservative movement look like? We’ve been running on low taxes, social conservatism, strong defense for thirty years. Are there new issues to rally around? Usually, movements arise because of needs unmet by the establishment. Right now, that’s immigration and spending (though on the latter, the leadership pays lip service to the cause).

I’m not sure chest-thumping on immigration and spending are Big Ideas, in the same way that defeating the Soviets or moving to a real market-based economy were Big Ideas. And you kind of need a Big Idea to launch a movement. Bush’s Social Security plan was a Big Idea, but the base showed no signs of being at all invested in it, the Congressional party ran for the hills, and some in the base saw it as shifting the focus away from their own agenda items.

Ruffini understands how "needs unmet by the establishment" can be the catalyst that turns a potential constituency into a true movement. He also recognizes that, from a conservative perspective, those unmet needs are a solution to the immigration question and, at long last, real limits (even cuts) in government spending.

But whey are these not "Big Ideas?" Why can't they be about something more than "chest-thumping?" Ruffini doesn't say, but let me offer my own exegesis: they're not Big Ideas because they don't transcend the shrinking conservative base. That's not to say that they aren't issues that concern most Americans, but immigration only divides the Republican coalition and the traditional conservative anti-spending line seems both structurally untenable and unlikely to appeal to constituencies beyond the rather narrow fiscal conservative base. Ruffini himself might not agree, at least consciously, but he seems to sense it. Immigration and spending might represent needs unmet by the establishment, but when it comes to building a majority coalition -- or even a unified conservative movement -- from them, Republicans just can't make the math work.

Soren Dayton agrees that immigration won't be a majority-making issue for conservatives. In his analysis, progressives have had room to rebuild their coalition at a rapid clip by "adding and activating ... middle and upper-middle class 'liberals.'" Republicans, on the other hand, find themselves in a strange position: having consolidated their own conservative coalition in 2004, they now find it splintering under the pressure. And the lack of internal consensus is likely to make things very interesting for conservatives over the next couple of years:

If there is no consensus on where the party goes, then this will probably be decided by a series of experiments involving primaries, national elections, and evolving coalitions in Congress. One upshot of the Goldwater/Reagan model was that the party agreed where to go from there. That’s what Reagan running in 1968, 1976, and 1980 did.

The question for us is going to be what constituencies or ideas we can add, in a coherent way. And we need to figure out who we have been bleeding and why. There are several ideas floating. One is anti-immigration, which is both wrong and small ball. One is David Brooks’ recent musings. One is Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s "Sam’s Club Republicans". The Bush answer is that we expand the current coalition beyond its white base. It is becoming entirely clear that some nostalgic returning to Reagan will not do it. That is why the Fred Thompson candidacy is both soothing and ultimately losing. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have other answers. Another answer is Mitt Romney’s, which would resemble the Thompson/Reagan strategy with a new image on health care. It is hard to know who he would add, except at the margins. No ideas, just image.

I agree with pretty much every word Dayton writes here. I've suggested that the breakdown of authority among the right's party and movement institutions could make the 2008 GOP primary election a genuine battle over ideas -- though I was skeptical that the decay was actually so advanced yet. I'm beginning to change my mind on this last point. But what Dayton says about Thompson is notable: it would be a candidacy based on masking the turmoil within the right.

Still, while the various ideas Dayton mentions might offer ways forward for conservatives and their party, I've yet to see much sign that any of the candidates are prepared to take them up. If the election is going to be an experiment, then we have to know the hypothesis. So far, all we're seeing is a lot of vacuous chest-thumping.*

What is particularly being avoided is any substantive re-examination of the post-Goldwater conservative assumptions about the role of government. But I'm happy to report that this particular discussion will take a turn in that direction.


*One exception: The Giuliani Hypothesis, which is that there are now circumstances that could permit a candidate to win the Republican nomination even while rejecting the core principles of the religious right.

Labels: conservative futures, movement building, Patrick Ruffini, Soren Dayton

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:22 AM 0 comments

  Looking for the New New Right (Part 1)

I want to call your attention to a very interesting discussion that's been going on for the past week or two over in the conservative wonkosphere (which is a much different place than the mouth-breathing thugosphere of the Malkins and Little Green Thingies). It starts as an exchange about the difference between campaigns and movement building, and evolves into a lively debate over the future of policy and ideology in the conservative movement itself -- indeed, over whether there is such a thing as the "conservative movement" anymore. I'll break up my own play-by-play into more than one post, since there are several different things worth observing here.

GOP internet strategist Patrick Ruffini kicks it off with a response to this post by Adrienne Royer, who compares the grassroots mobilization strategies of the Dean and Bush/Cheney campaigns:

The Dean Model established relationships with smaller target groups. Correspondence was written by real individuals and supporters were engaged through open communications, such as a blog. Members were motivated to not only campaign for their candidate, but to also volunteer and participate in community programs. The Bush/Cheney Plan, however, used grassroots tactics but through top-down communication. Individuals were organized, but no sense of community was achieved and the movement fell apart soon after the election, whereas the Dean campaign reorganized into Democracy for America.

Ruffini, who helped organize the GOP's 2004 grassroots efforts, responds:

I can sing chapter and verse on why our model was better. Lateral communications (or community building amongst supporters) is a worthwhile goal in itself, but often gets confused with what it takes to do GOTV in the final days of an election. That’s when you want a unified message, and you don’t want canvassers coming up with their own talking points. The end result of that strategy is Dean in Iowa.

But in the run-up to the election, in the times between the Super Saturdays, the W ROCKS events, the Test Drives for W, and the 72 Hour Plan, community building was a tremendously important part of cementing and solidifying that grassroots army. At those moments, the Bush Grassroots Machine was something to behold. [...]

Did we sustain it? Well, that’s a fair question. The Bush list did continue on at the RNC. We did parties. We activated the base on key issues. That’s a greater continuity of effort than we saw on the other side. Terry McAuliffe famously boasted of wanting to bring all the Democrat candidate email lists in-house to the DNC. In the end, not one obliged, not even John Kerry. He kept his own list, blasted to it regularly during the 2006 elections, and as Chris Cillizza has been fond of harping on, that 3 million list alone was probably the only reason he could be considered viable for 2008.

Ruffini does wish that the "volunteer community-building [had] been kept alive under the Bush brand name," since people tend to be more willing to enlist to support a particular candidate than to support a party.

The lesson, for Ruffini, is that elected officials should make stronger efforts to stay in touch with the people on their email lists after the election. But Soren Dayton, a Republican blogger and consultant, argues that Ruffini missed the point by missing a key distinction: "campaigns versus movements":

In 2005, the Dean list and community was converted into an unprecedented grassroots candidacy for DNC chair. And the Deaniacs took over state parties and county parties around the country. The Deaniacs lost the 2004 primary campaign but may yet transform their party over the long-term. That’s a movement, not one campaign. And, over the long-term, movements have a lot more power. In short, the online left is solving a different problem than the Bush campaign was. The online left is trying to change their party, not elect candidates. [...]

MoveOn and Dean for America, rebranded as Democracy for America, did continue to activate with their 3m list. And they don’t have to take orders from the party. To them, candidates are a way of effecting policy changes, not the objective in-and-of-themselves, like they are for a party committee. Whatever candidate we nominate in 2008 is going to have a different coalition. Will the Generation Joshua guys show up for a Rudy Giuliani, a John McCain, or a Mitt Romney? I kinda doubt it.

I continue to believe that the right way to understand the online left is not as a party, but as a movement. Their historical antecedent is the New Right, using direct mail, the new technology of the day, to raise money and deliver message. In essence, the new technology is being used to expand the power and size of a part of the coalition that hasn’t had a seat at the table of the Democratic Party.

Dayton's post is a remarkable indication of how the more clued-in young conservative intellectuals are beginning to feel as though the right has been leapfrogged in terms of movement-building, thanks to the efforts of the progressive netroots and grassroots since 2004. That's heartening in and of itself, but it's also a point of departure for an exploration of whether a "new new right" might be in the cards. As Dayton puts it:

The online left is a movement to reinvent and renew the Democratic party. The question for the GOP is whether we need something similar. A newly organized coalition, etc. I think that the answer is "yes."

What are the elements of a successful political movement (as opposed to just a series of campaigns)? An alienated mass constituency (or potential constituency), for one. For Goldwater's new right, that was what you might call the Midwestern petite-bourgeoisie -- isolationist, anti-communist, and frustrated with the post-war social compact between labor and big capitalism (later on, of course, it would expand to include anti-civil rights Southern whites and anti-tax Westerners). For the current progressive movement, it has been the young white middle class: socially progressive, increasingly anti-war, and forward-looking.

Beyond that, you need ideas to appeal to that constituency, organizing technologies to spur and channel their activism (direct mail, the internet, extra-party political associations, etc.), and the ability to sustain the effort over time.

For all the talk of the progressive advantage on the internet, I think that conservatives actually have a perfectly good grasp -- in some ways, better than ours -- of how to use political technologies (though we can debate whether their base is inherently less-suited to "bottom-up" organizing styles -- personally, I think that that theory is a bit overblown). And while the right's leadership is populated with dinosaurs, they do nonetheless appear to have young intellectuals capable of developing good ideas.

What's not clear is whether, at this point, they have a mass constituency to which they can appeal. The apparent paucity of actual ideas on the right may have a lot to do with this: if you don't know who you're talking to or what they want, it can be difficult to have much to say. And this question will come into sharper focus as the exchange continues.

Labels: conservative futures, movement building, Patrick Ruffini, Soren Dayton

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:06 AM 0 comments

  Tom DeLay Is Smoking Grass(roots)

America's favorite criminally-indicted exterminator has been keeping busy lately. His blog has come a long way since the days when he had to shut off comments because, well, nobody likes him. Now it's slick, conversational, and steeping in the aura of netroots authenticity. Most of its posts, naturally, seem to involve a fixation with Nancy Pelosi.

Next to a banner ad for the Bugman's new book (No Retreat, No Surrender - to which, one might add, Just Disgrace), the "About the Blog" blurb makes an earnest pitch:

The importance of the blogosphere in shaping and motivating the current conservative movement is unquestionable- not only has it served as an important tool in breaking through the liberal MSM clutter but it has helped to keep our elected officials true to principle.

This blog is meant to further the online discussion in the marketplace of ideas.

The peculiarly Republican interpretation of "keeping true to principle" has a lot to do with DeLay's own early retirement - not to mention his party's current Congressional exile. DeLay himself was a leader in finding new and often wholly inverted ways to define "principle." He also figured out how to look fabulous in a mugshot - give the man some credit.

So, like I said, he's been keeping busy. Eve Fairbanks of the New Republic caught up with the Hammer and found a man determined, apparently, to become the right's version of Kos, Howard Dean, and Eli Pariser - all rolled into one. Besides the blog, his new projects include:

• "Tom DeLay's Grassroots Action/Information Network" (not to be confused with Democratic GAIN) - a "a staunch opponent of secular progressive pressure groups and radical leftist agendas wherever they may be found in the United States."

TDGAIN promises to be organized in every congressional district in America, to "advocate for conservative first principles." Its members are promised the chance to both "Communicate with Tom DeLay" (by reading his newsletter) and "Help Tom DeLay" (by, well, it's unclear - but petitioning will probably be involved). As a special bonus:

You will also receive insider updates on Mr. DeLay’s schedule including appearances, events, and book signings both in your area and nationally.

Lucky you!

• The Coalition for a Conservative Majority, whose website is currently inoperative (link is to a cached version).

Like TDGAIN, the CCM "will organize in all 50 states" and do grassrootsy-things. The CCM site also reveals the true story of the progressive grassroots:

For six years now, former leaders of the Clinton Administration have studied and surpassed the conservative grassroots network, creating a liberal coalition unprecedented in its size, scope, and funding. This is the network that beat conservatives in 2006 and handed Congress back to the Democrat Party – and that was just the warm-up. The liberal Shadow Party has been built for one reason: to elect Hillary Clinton President of the United States in 2008. They have the money, the organization, and the coordination to do it, and there is no conservative network capable of standing in its path. Until now.

That's right folks: the entire progressive movement was built by and for the Clintons. It's fascinating, actually - this is the same mindset that reacts to 9/11 by fixating on Saddam Hussein. Complex phenomena are simplified and personalized - and very often attached to people who in fact have nothing to do with them. Meanwhile, you can almost hear the rumbling low-register voice of the movie trailer: And only one man could stand in their way....

Tom DeLay doesn't just want to grow the conservative grassroots. He wants to rip up the soil, plant his own seeds across the nation, and control every inch of the turf. He wants to be the sun toward which every blade turns. Having been expelled from the corridors of power, DeLay intends to marshal his forces out on the lawn. Fairbanks quotes Paul Weyrich on the Bugman: "He wants to run the outside."

None of it sounds much like real grassroots organizing as you or I know it. It's more like astroturf, on a grand scale. And there's a certain unsettling mania to DeLay's effort. As Fairbanks describes it, the man who once put the fear of God into the Republican Congressional caucus now "sees a need for such harsh discipline in the grassroots." But while he swings around rolling out the plastic turf, his real motives emerge:

DeLay's mission to save the conservative grassroots isn't driven only by an ideological calling, the fulfillment of the American Passion's prophecy. There's also revenge. The activist troops he's now so eager to captain are the very ones that failed to come to his aid enthusiastically enough when he was under siege a year ago. "He was extremely frustrated at the end" of his time in Congress, notes Weyrich, because he "thought that he did not get the kind of support from the outside that he felt he was entitled to." Now DeLay has the chance to take over the grassroots and mold them into an obedient force. Says Weyrich, "He's thinking to himself, If I construct an organization. ...'"

Fairbanks interviews a few conservative activists who say that DeLay's efforts are bound to come up against resistance:

Several conservative activists told me they find the idea that they need DeLay's training distasteful, as if he were on a mission to civilize savages. "I don't think it'll work, because conservatives are very individualistic, and they don't take well to people dictating to them what they need to do," says one.

I'll let you make your own judgments as to whether that's an accurate portrayal of the conservative psyche. The real problem for DeLay may be that he's not the only disgraced conservative trying to build Conservative Grassroots Machine 2.0. As Fairbanks points out, Dick Armey's got a gang of his own. And we've already mentioned Newt's new network.

Three former conservative leaders of Congress. Three under-employed ideologues. Their machines failed to save them from their own corruption and incompetence. So, with nothing else to do, they've set themselves to building better machines. It's easy to mock - really, delightfully easy - but take this new flurry of activity in the conservative movement as a warning. Armey, Gingrich and DeLay may be politically dead, but they're building armies of zombies to carry on anyway.

Labels: conservatives, movement building, Newt Gingrich, The New Republic, Tom DeLay

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:47 AM 0 comments