This has worked out well for them in terms of getting attention and making noise, but politically, the long-term effects might be disastrous to their party; the business model of the media is completely different from that of a political party. Media personalities gain publicity by saying outrageous things, but politicians often avoid saying anything substantive at all; media personalities can succeed by appealing strongly to a small minority, but political parties can succeed only by winning the favor of the majority.
To be a successful politician, you want approval ratings above 50%; to get the job of President, you need at least 60 million votes, or about 1 in 5 Americans.
To be a successful cable TV host like Glenn Beck, you need Nielsen ratings of fewer than 2 million viewers, or about 1 in 150 Americans.
To be a successful author like Sarah Palin, you need to sell books to about 1 million people, or about 1 in 300 Americans.
Palin near her Alaska home, seeing Russia in the distance, as Putin rears his head.
Beck made $2 million off his TV show last year, and leveraged that exposure to make an additional $30 million dollars through other outlets. Palin made $7 million off her book, Going Rogue, and has made $12 million total since leaving office last July. Beck and Palin have been hugely successful as media personalities, but it's a mistake for the GOP to take its cues from them: they've succeeded by targeting what the media calls a niche; in politics, it's called the fringe.
There aren't very many political movements where the business model is similar to that of a media figure, where the goal is to have strong appeal to a narrow audience. The one exception is a terrorist organization; they don't need broad popular support for their cause, they just need to win over a few zealots, who'll bully the rest of society to cave into their demands.
By ceding control of their movement to the media business model, the conservative movement has ended up using the same business model used by terrorist organizations. This has coincided with the rise of the Tea Party, a media-driven performance-group that's grown rapidly by courting the fringe and pulling publicity stunts. Its relevant to note that, from a strictly tactical standpoint, the Boston Tea Party was a terrorist act; morally it was justifiable, but their methods involved a small group using violence to draw attention and coerce political change.
Last month, a Tea Party organizer tried to post the address of Democratic Representative Thomas Perriello and urged Tea Party members to "drop by". One of the Tea Party-people ended up going to the house and cutting the gas line, even though the house actually belonged to Perriello's brother. Fortunately no one died.
There were also the brick throwing incidents, where a conservative blogger goaded people across the country into smashing the windows of Democratic party offices: "We can break their windows. Break them NOW. And if we do a proper job, if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.” Of course, like any good terrorist, he was quick to claim responsibility after his followers carried out his orders; this probably got his blog a ton of extra traffic.
This is the actual brick that broke the window of the Monroe County Democratic Committee Office. You can tell its authentic because the spelling is wrong.
Everyone knows that politicians are relentless self-promoters, but the burden of needing a majority to win office has usually kept them from being too reckless and sensational. But now, the most prominent Conservative voices are no longer politicians, instead they're media personalities like Palin or media-driven performance-groups like the Tea Party. They're not trying to get elected, they're just trying to get attention, so they can sell their books or their blogs to a fringe audience.
Michelle Bachmann might currently hold office, but the way she conducts herself, it seems more like she's lining up a tv show or a book deal, as she says herself, "When I came to Congress, I didn’t come here to stay here as a fixture for ever and ever."
Last week, Bill Clinton gave a speech to commemorate Oklahoma City, in it he said that one of the lessons of that bombing was that political leaders need to be careful about the words they use, to avoid inciting their unstable followers to violence. He said, "one of the things that the conservatives have always brought to the table in America is a reminder that no law can replace personal responsibility. And the more power you have and the more influence you have, the more responsibility you have."
That's precisely the problem: due to the current leadership void, the Conservatives who have all the influence are no longer being held accountable by the need to win a majority; their only pressure is create a strong appeal to a small group of extremists. Glen Beck and Sarah Palin have done a great job as de facto leaders, inciting passions among their followers, but I doubt we'll see them claim responsibility if something tragic happens.
This happened in the Midwest, not the Middle East.
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