Tim F. at Balloon Juice has an interesting take on the “digital divide” between Conservatives and Liberals on the Internet. Generally speaking, it seems that Democratic candidates have thriving online operations and liberal netizens have some degree of influence on Democratic politicians. Meanwhile, Republican candidates don’t seem to be having nearly the online success of their Democratic counterparts and conservative netizens don’t have the same degree of influence on their preferred politicians. Says former Republican Congressional aide David All: “For the most part Republicans are stuck in Internet circa 2000.”
I don’t know if there is any scientific basis, but, as one reason for the divide, Tim F. asserts what I’ve seen passing as the common wisdom about the disposition of conservatives versus liberals. Conservatives respond better to authority than do liberals. Liberals are less organized. “Ask 3 Democrats, get 4 opinions.” The result is that radio is a more effective communication tool for conservative political operations than the Internet. Radio is one-to-many without a lot of that anti-authority “feedback” messing things up. Internet is more of a “many-to-many” form of communication. The ability for the liberal rabble rousers to argue among themselves ends up being a positive thing for Democratic political operations:
“What was once seen as a liability for Democrats and progressives in the past—they couldn’t get 20 people to agree to the same thing, they could never finish anything, they couldn’t stay on message—is now an asset,†Leyden said. “All this talking and discussing and fighting energizes everyone, involves everyone, and gets people totally into it.â€
Tim F. says:
Researchers like Bob Altmeyer have exhaustively demonstrated that conservative followers like being told what to think and conservative leaders don’t tolerate input from the masses. In that way radio is the perfect medium, sending the Party line through a select group of reliable disseminators to the polloi with little chance for feedback, which liberals value but authoritarians hate. It helps explain why few conservative blogs allow comments and why Clear Channel radio often jettisons popular local conservatives to make room for a Limbaugh/Hannity/Savage monoculture. Feedback is a bug and the more mouthpieces you have the harder it gets to control the Party line.
Interesting theory, though it obviously paints with an awfully broad brush. I have noticed that conservative bloggers tend not to open up their comments as much as liberal bloggers seem to. That’s just one data point — coming from me, it’s also an anectdotal one. Even if there are these tendencies among Republican and Democratic voters, I suspect that these tendencies are very susceptible to being overridden as the political times change. With Iraq and George W. Bush’s betrayal of articulated conservative pricniples hanging as albatrosses around their neck, I think the Democrats will find themselves with considerably more power in the near future. Power will work its corrupting influence. Institutional players with huge money will seek to influence the Democrats even more and, as they gain influence, online liberal citizens will lose what influence they do have. Meanwhile, the Republicans will regroup, become more responsive to citizens, and will use the Internet more effectively.
Just a guess.
Doug-
I think you hit the root of this “divide” with the observation “I suspect that these tendencies are very susceptible to being overridden as the political times change.” After 7 years of mismanaging government the Republican Party has demoralized much of its base and the party will appear to be bereft of any ideas until the debris field in the White House has been cleared away.
The notion that the political right that is into talk radio (and it is more right wing populism than it is conservatism) “like being told what to think” sounds to me like self-flattery. Both sides like to have their biases confirmed. Right wing talk radio always struck me more as an echo chamber than a vehicle for telling the right what to think.
Paul, there may be little defense for wholesale psychoanalysis, but the fact remains that any Republican trying to portray the party as a hotbed of internal debate (David Brooks every couple of weeks, for example) runs into a considerable problem: lack of evidence. It generally comes from someone like Brooks (or Tim F.) from the so-called libertarian wing who somehow managed to convince himself, pre-Schiavo, that the religious radicals held no real power in the party, and who since then has been trying to convince himself that it’s Bush’s incompetence, and not that of the program he supported whole-heartedly, which is the source of its abject failure.
Everything’s cyclical. No doubt that’s a comforting mantra on the Right these days. But this follows thirty years of programmatic “Conservatism” which has been pretty good at winning elections but not much good at doing anything more except cutting taxes and defeating tenth-rate military powers. It’s gonna take some doing to pick up all the pieces.