These days, Republican political professionals seem to feel rather like Mikhail Gorbachev did in 1983 when he toured farms in Canada two years before he would become premier of the Soviet Union. Stunned by how productive a certain agribusiness was, Gorbachev asked how many farmhands had brought in the crop. “None,” came the answer; the farm was entirely mechanized.
From this one conversation, Gorbachev instantly understood the depths of the Soviet crisis and the desperate need for a new approach. For Republicans, the November 2012 election proved their technical inferiority in exactly the same way — it all came home to them in one day, Nov. 6, as President Obama’s campaign demonstrated a degree of technological superiority above the GOP’s efforts as shocking in its way as the mechanized agribusiness was to the hidebound ways of Soviet agriculture.
The pain came not only from the defeat but also from a humbling sense of reversal. For most of the past 30 years, it was Democrats and liberals who had found themselves outplayed technologically by Republicans and conservatives.
In 1980, the great advance was the use of direct mail, previously a tool mainly for garnering magazine subscriptions, as a means of fund-raising and voter engagement.
Conservatives dominated in this arena, and it was through direct mail that many of the Right’s enduring organizations (the Heritage Foundation, among others) solidified their financial and grassroots bases. It also provided Ronald Reagan with crucial external support against the overwhelming hostility of the mainstream media.
In the late 1980s came the rise of national talk radio. The AM band had been driven into irrelevance by FM — but then the “fairness doctrine” requiring ideological balance over the airwaves was lifted. Pioneers like Rush Limbaugh literally invented a new medium that went entirely ignored by liberals and Democrats until it became a key to the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994.
The same forces that found a voice in talk radio also became early adopters of the Internet, Limbaugh among them. He was an ardent user of services like Compuserve and AOL, and so were his listeners. In one hilarious guerrilla stunt in the early 1990s, Limbaugh listeners en masse joined a chat room at AOL dedicated to animal rights and turned it into a pro-vivisection forum.
Talk radio and the Internet were disrupters — they offered ways to transmit information and ideas that had been blocked or disrespected by the mainstream-media gatekeepers. Liberals had no need of them; they had the reins everywhere else.
That media-disruption advantage continued through the 1990s, with the rise of Fox News and the World Wide Web. The first major Web event was driven by the Right: The conservative-libertarian duo of Matt Drudge and the late Andrew Breitbart brought the Lewinsky scandal to the nation through the deceptively modest Drudge Report Web site after the mainstream lion Newsweek (circulation at the time: 3 million) had spiked the story.
Today, the Drudge Report gets 25 million hits a day; Newsweek is dead.
The lopsided new-media balance in favor of the Right only began to shift the other way when two generations of Left liberals that had grown up and around personal computing were awakened to passionate political activism by their opposition to the War on Terror and the Iraq War. They started groundbreaking Web sites like the Daily Kos and raised millions of dollars through the Internet for the insurgent Democratic candidacy of Howard Dean in 2003.
They were disrupters too, but not media disrupters — they were conservative disrupters, driven by a profound negative energy. They wanted to destroy George W. Bush and the GOP, while Bush and the GOP were fighting other battles and relying on the power of the technological advantages the right had developed over prior decades.
The unexpected success of the GOP’s efforts in the 1980s and 1990s created a profound complacency among the leaders of the Right, who did not see just how powerful the newest media approaches — social media primarily — could be. In this respect they were no different from those on the Left who’d been blindsided by Limbaugh, Fox News and Drudge.
Liberals now need to guard against the seductive power of their own successes. They seem to think they own the technological future because they own the technological present, but it is precisely this sense of ownership that creates complacency. Desperation and a sense of exclusion are the drivers of change, as Gorbachev’s example proved.
Of course, Gorbachev’s reforms ended the existence of the Soviet Union. But then, a break-up of the sclerotic union of entrenched interest groups and paid consultants that runs the Republican Party today would only benefit its voters and the right-of-center ideas to which they subscribe.