Small Tents vs. Big Networks: Recreating the GOP

Let's take a bite at one of the bigger questions floating around the technology and politics world at the moment. The subject: the future of the Republican Party. Does the redemption of the GOP rest with mastering the field, communications, and fundraising technologies that Barack Obama used to good effect in his presidential win? Or do conservatives need to take this moment, when they control not one of the branches of government, to re-figure out just what it is the party stands for, what political need it fills in the hearts and minds of American voters? The real answer, of course, isn't one or the other -- not wholeheartedly, at least. But implicit in the question is a compelling debate over just what technology is good for when it comes to politics, from winning elections to governing in a way that gives you a shot at getting re-elected.

One of the latest contributions to the discussion comes from Ars Technica's Julian Sanchez. (I say "one of the latest" because it's an evolving debate, but Julian brings up some meaty topics worth considering.) There seems to be common ground for everyone who has had a say on the topic. There are areas where the GOP unequivocally needs to catch up with Democrats if it wants to stick around for another generation -- namely, how it gathers, organizes, and uses data about voters and supporters. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe has talked about how handing the keys to this data to its über-volunteers effectively expanded the campaign's staff without the investment of much resources. That said, it won't be entirely clear about how much of an advantage the left has on field technology unless the Obama campaign gets a bit more loose-lipped about how it did its thing.

And, of course, there's a level of core competence without which much of this whole discussion becomes moot, and at some point not knowing how to use the Internet or thinking of it as some secondary characteristic of politics comes close to professional malpractice. But wrapping your mind around the potential of modern tech tools can take a bit of time. Enter projects like Top Conservatives on Twitter or the #dontgo micromovement, which are, to my mind, simply proof-of-concept. Think of them as the cutting of conservative teeth on some of the new tech tools they might like to make more use of down the road.

But Rebuild the Party, which Julian focuses on, is a different story. That effort sets out pretty clearly the idea that the revitalization of the GOP is ball-and-chained to technology. That's a meaningful choice that steals a bit of thunder from ideology -- despite the protestations of Rebuild co-founder Patrick Ruffini that "[t]he idea that what a party stands for is more important than the tools it uses is so blindlingly obvious that I wonder exactly why people feel compelled to throw it in our faces." The compulsion to hammer on the point might come from the fact that point one of their 10-point plan plants a pretty huge flag: "The Internet: Our #1 Priority in the Next Four Years." Or take this statement: "Before the Internet, Barack Obama would never have defeated Hillary Clinton to become the Democratic nominee and the next President," which draws a fairly arguable line in the sand.

It's assertions like those don't exactly dissuade people from thinking that the Ruffini et al plan for revitalizing the Republican plan decidedly puts strategy over ideology or message. But it's where technology can help redraft the meaning of the party that's powerful. Julian puts places himself more or less on the right side of the political spectrum, and so I'll grant that my own knowledge of conservative history might not be up to his. That said, the GOP, his framing of the party as adrift ever since the end of the Cold War robbed it of its raison d'etre doesn't go without saying. It makes about as much sense to me to see the Grand Old Party circa 2009 as the end result of Barry Goldwater begat Ronald Reagan begat Newt Gingrich. Through that perspective, the Republican Party isn't so much a party of opposition missing an opponent as it is something that stands for something. Look at the Contract with America. Love it or loathe it, it's eight principles of good government (open committee meetings, independent auditing of Congress) and ten proactive bills, from a balanced-budget amendment to anti-crime laws. Add in a dash of the Horatio Alger up-from-your-bootstraps self-conception that doesn't seem to have gone anywhere amongst the American right, and that's something to root a party in.

So what technology offers the GOP isn't tactical advantage. (At least, it's not just tactical advantage.) What Twitter, Facebook, blogging, email, so on and so forth offer is the chance for the Republican Party to become more representative of Republicans. Let's say it another way. Technology opens the doors to a party more responsive to a broader mass of people than it currently serves. Importantly, it can put the rank-and-file at the forefront of setting its agenda. Just yesterday, all six contenders for Republican Party chair gathered at a debate hosted by Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. The event was webcast and questions for the candidates were solicited online. Ruffini and his Rebuild the Party co-founder Mindy Finn were even invited onstage to ask questions of the candidates. (Squint a bit, and one could almost see Norquist with one hand on a baton, passing it to Finn and Ruffini.) Ruffini's question came from the, as he put it, the Rebuild the Party "community." Notably, it had nothing whatsoever to do with technology. Recall that conservative consultant David All caused a stir recently when he objected to a background image on sitting chairman Mike Duncan's website showing the well-manicured greens of a Kentucky country club. That's exactly the "feedback loop" that Finn describes in her comments on Julian's post.

It helps, I think, to think of the GOP as less a smallish tent that needs to get bigger and more of a network that needs to add more connections and nodes. Contra Ruffini's question to the RNC candidates -- which actually concerned what one issue the GOP should coalesce around -- when you think of the party as a network you can start to shed the somewhat outmoded idea that a party needs a single rallying point. To borrow a phrase from Howard Dean, a single-minded "guns, God, and gays" banner might be a thing of the past. A networked party has enough oxygen to support multiple foci. In the '08 presidential race, the differences between the anti-war left and the pro-civil-liberties left and the pro-gay-equality left and the pro-government-reform-left never really came to a head. Not because they played particularly nice or because of some newfound political maturity, but because they weren't fighting for attention and resources in the same way as in years past. All amassed under the rather generic banner of Change!, and it was off to the races. A distributed party also, it seems, does a better job of supporting niche public intellectuals, from Austen Goolsbee (an economist who studies the Internet and networks) to Susan Crawford (who works on Internet freedoms). There will probably be a bunch more names to add to that list in Obama's Washington. You don't have to be a John Kenneth Galbraith or Bill Buckley anymore to have meaningful influence in your own limited sphere.

Of course, then there's the fundraising part of an embrace of technology, without which the right won't be able to compete. You can no more divorce online fundraising from openness of online engagement than you can separate elections from governing. One fuels the other. Obama's fundraising success no doubt came from the fact that there was a strong scent of possible victory in the air in the later months of the campaign. But throughout his remarkable run it also was driven by the recognition by supporters that the campaign belonged to them in some meaningful way.

Moreover, a close study of the history of the online left reveals that there's an intensely personal aspect to the way that progressives have made use of technology since, more or less, the launch of the Iraq war in 2003. Largely the relationships between up and coming (for lack of a better term) members of the left have been created online and reaffirmed there again and again there. RootsCamp, the left's annual gathering of activists, operatives, and thinkers, is a boiled-down summer camp of progressive Kumbaya that strengthens the ties that bind them. The most recent RootsCamp, held in mid-December at DC's Trinity College, attracted about 600 attendees. They hashed over stuff like whether the gay establishment failed utterly on California's Proposition 8 to what the Obama campaign's team-based organizing model did right and what it did wrong, and then partied their pants off at night. Netroots Nation, now in its fourth year, is an even bigger gathering of online progressives. Is there anything comparable to either on the right?

All that said, if the Republican Party is scared about what it might find out about itself, a possibility that Julian seems to raise, then retrospection of the kind that technological engagement might force is probably a good thing. Thanks to the Internet, the time has largely passed when we can hide from who we -- and our allies -- are.