Just to piggy back of Chris's excellent post, I'll note that there is an increasing likelihood that Republicans are going to shed some of their big business allegiances and retreat into a much more nativist mode. I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out. First of all, Saxby Chambliss gave Sarah Palin credit for this victory last night.
"I can't overstate the impact she had down here," Chambliss said during an interview Wednesday morning on Fox News.
"When she walks in a room, folks just explode," he added. "And they really did pack the house everywhere we went. She's a dynamic lady, a great administrator, and I think she's got a great future in the Republican Party."
Palin uses the term 'good union job' to describe her husband's work, and generally operates as a reactionary populist. What prevents her from taking over the party is the big business interests in the party, who do not like her because they do not like people that laud good union jobs, even by accident (this dynamic was reproduced for Huckabee as well). But the financial crisis is having a very weird effect. Foundations are devastated because of endowment losses, leading to nonprofit cutbacks, corporations are cutting back on lobbying, and advertising sales that sustain mainstream conservative media are crashing. The right-wing infrastructure is probably going to face serious cutbacks, as rich people and companies find their wealth evaporating.
In other words, it's going to become cheaper to organize people than money, which will help populists across the board. That means the Republicans might morph into a fully nativist populist party during a prolonged economic slump, and big business will invest relatively more in the Democratic Party.
I believe there's something of a cottage industry speculating on when the conservatives will develop an internet presence to rival the left's. Today, it's Jose Antonio Vargas publishing a piece on the rightroots, but it's been in Newsweek, in the Politico many times, and their whole drilling Twitter fiasco captured a bunch of publicity. It's rather amusing to see the same establishment news outlets rail against liberal impotence while sending journalists to find out when the right will build a fearsome presence to rival those impotent liberals, but consistency is not a strong suit of modern politics.
The problem with the Rightroots is simple. In order to build a real movement, you have to organize a previously unorganized constituency group and use it to build power. The right did that in the 1970s, we did it this decade. They used direct mail and mega-churches, we used the internet. Right now, their direct mail organized white Christian base is aging and turning into a militantly minority voting bloc, and while they may like reading blogs, they already were listening to Rush and reading direct mail and buying guns, etc. It's not new marginal power, whereas Dailykos captured people who were not reading the Nation and effectively damaged the New Republic. The Republican base is still garnering around 46% nationally of the vote and holding onto a bunch of neoliberal Congressional suburban districts, but the basic anti-tax white flight model of politics is aging, and it shows.
Ultimately, their problem is not that the party doesn't use the internet, their problem is that the party's base is shrinking and they can't find a new compatible unorganized constituency group. I believe there have been five or six attempts to start a Republican version of Moveon, but it's always by a variant of this type of startup model: Republican political consultants who are boxed out of the party's inner circle.
If they find such a group, it will be through the web, but so far, the Huckabee and Ron Paul boomlets do not allow these newer consultants and party officials to maintain their current set of institutional relationships while expanding their base.
My guess is that they'll find such a constituency group in the next few years, and the animus will be race and economic instability, as it always is. And then journalists can really write the story of the rightroots, or whatever they call themselves at that point. It is likely that only the really attentive and risk-taking rightroots folk will be along for the ride, because building a movement is about taking power from existing groups by representing a new group of people.
Who is that group? And where are they? That's the question. My hope is that this is a moderating progressive group that wants low taxes and progressive governance, but we're in an age of extremes, so I'm not sure that's possible.
STATE BLOGS
