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My Townhall colleagues Dean Barnett and Matt Lewis seem to have gotten into a bit of a scrape with my friend Rob Bluey (of RedState) on the merits of activism vs. punditry in blogging.
On one level, I agree with Matt that a fusionist approach is needed. To harken back to the analog era, conservatives would never have gained power had it not been for institutions like AEI and Heritage whose ideas gave our movement a driving impetus. But we’ve also had to master the instrumentality of elections to sustain that power. More to the point, Morton Blackwell famously said, “Personnel is policy.” That applies just as much to political leaders as it does to the appointees Blackwell was referring to. The blogosphere has expended a lot of energy trying to convince politicians who aren’t very ideological of the pressing need to control spending. Wouldn’t that energy have been better spent recruiting, training, and electing a new generation of political leaders who believed in smaller government to the core?
That means we need more activism, not less. It’s what the netroots has done in elevating people like Jon Tester and Jim Webb who are far to the left of their respective states but convey a red state, tough-guy aura that trumps ideology. It’s easier to influence policy when you’ve helped to put people you trust on the inside.
All in all, I think Dean’s final statement captures the dilemma in full:
I’m a writer, not an activist, and I have no interest in changing. Although, come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind 600,000 visits a day like Markos gets.
But isn’t that the point? We can’t magically snap our fingers and get 600,000 visits just doing what we’re doing now. We’ve made a conscious choice to sacrifice quantity for quality. The same 50-100K daily readers that the top conservative blogs get are the same 50,000 people who will buy a well-written conservative title from Regnery and the same 150,000 who subscribe to National Review. That’s just the market for conservative opinion content.
Blogging on the left succeeds because it’s not about writing. It’s no coincidence that Kos’s writing style is almost comically pedestrian. It’s not about wordplay. It’s about attitude, and expressing a basic world view that millions of people share — only more so. In the same way that Tom Paine got more readers than Montesquieu, Kos gets more readers than Dean. If Dean wanted to be Kos, he’d need to drop about 50 IQ points.
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