Two Books Conservatives Must Read in 2009
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
12/29/08 8:09 AM EST
My friend Erick Erickson gave the conservative movement and the GOP in which it mostly resides a delightful Christmas present with an extremely insightful post up on RedState.com regarding the role of technology in the future of the conservative movement. Erick's esssential point is that the way in which we learn the art of campaigning and winning elections in the digital era is not likely to come from political consultants claiming to be techies.
To the contrary, the people who create the new digital tools that will open doors to renewed conservative success probably aren't even conservatives or remotely connected to the conservative policy establishment:
"Let me repeat it because it has become my constant theme: to succeed online, the right needs to invest in technologists who know politics and not political consultants who know technology. It is a hell of a lot easier to learn politics than it is technology. Further, technologists understand, develop, and use technology is a way more akin to what normal people do. Political consultants don’t do that. And it is doubly important to go outside of Washington, D.C. because of both points of view and circles of friends."
You should also read Patrick Ruffini's response to Erick on The Next Right. Among much else of great value in Patrick's post is this very practical but wise suggestion:
"The GOP needs geeks and engineers to build the tools. 115,000 people have just been laid off in the technology sector. There needs to be a concerted effort to identify those who are politically libertarian and conservative and get them to work building tools for the movement. I don't have any illusions that the majority of this group are on our side, but if we are better organized it won't matter. Even if we only have a pool of 10,000 to pick from, that's about 100 times better than what we have today."
I can only imagine what conservatives could do if we had a mere 1,000 - much less 10,000! - "geeks and engineers" working on new Web uses for the movement.
But there is another critical point left unaddressed by both Erick and Patrick - though both no doubt have discussed this point in other contexts - and that is the necessity of conservatives recognizing and accepting just how profoundly the world has changed as a result of the Internet and learning to think, see and speak as do the inhabitants of the new digital world. We have to learn to translate timeless conservative truths to their language and thought patterns.
To that end, I strongly recommend reading two books. First is "Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is changing your world" by Don Tapscott (a Canadian who is not related, at least that I know of, to my Texas/Oklahoma branch of the Tapscott clan), and the second is "Wikinomics: How mass collaboration is changing everthing" by Tapscott and Anthony Williams.
Those of us in the Baby Boom grew up with TV as our dominant communications tool, and with the truism constantly pounded into our heads that we were "the biggest and best educated generation ever." The reality is that the Net Generation - aka "Net-Geners," those born between 1977 and 1996 - is bigger, and is certainly better educated in some crucially important areas of technology and its applications to everyday life.
As shocking a thought as it may be to many, I believe there are firm and credible grounds to believe the Net-Geners will ultimately turn out to be far more conservative than the Boomers ever thought about being. The indicators of conservative social mores among Net-Geners are steadily emerging as we learn more about how they have responded to issue clusters such as growing up in and coping with the divorce culture created by their Boomer parents.
But this goes far beyond a generational response to cultural decay passed on from a previous generation. Tapscott makes a persuasive case that the Net-Geners are simply "wired" differently because they've grown up in a digital world. One consequence of this fact is that Net-Geners have different normative values:
"These are the eight norms of the Net Generation. They value freedom - to be who they are, freedom of choice. They want to customize everything, even their jobs. They learn to be skeptical, to scrutinize what they see and read in the media, including the Internet. They value integrity - being honest, considerate, transparent, and abiding by their committments. They're great collaborators, with friends online and at work. They thrive on speed. They love to innovate."
Note how antithetical those norms are to fundamental assumptions of the top-down, centralized, bureaucratic command economy that characterizes 20the Century liberalism. There's the opportunity - Conservatives must learn to speak in terms that are relevant to people who hold such norms. This is no easy task and not only because the pace of change in things like the meaning of commonly used terms is faster by orders of magnitude, compared to the pre-Internet era.
Conservatives must also learn to develop and refine applications of conservative principle that echo those Net-Gen norms. There is simply no under-emphasizing, for example. the importance of web-based collaboration to the future of conservative thinking for government and society. Collaboration comes as naturally to Net-Geners as drinking water and breathing oxygen.
But it would be a monumental mistake for conservatives to reject the Net-Geners collaborational consciousness as merely a beehive, collectivist mentality. The Internet makes collaboration among empowered individuals not merely possible, but the essential element of business and every other field of endeavor, including, sooner or later, government.
As Tapscott and Williams put it in the "Wikinomics" analysis:
"...the old monolithic multinational that creates value in a closed hierarchial fashion is dead. Winning companies today have open and porous boundaries and compete by reaching outside their walls to harness external knowledge, resources and capabilities. Even the stodgy, capital-intensive manufacturing industries are no exception to this rule. Indeed, there is no part of the economy where this opening and blurring corporate boundaries has more revolutionary potential."
This insight contains incredibly explosive potential for conservatives who are willing to learn how to frame their vision in its terms.
It is tempting to think in the wake of the GOP loss of its congressional majority in 2006, the Bush administration's succumbing to the temptation of bailouts and the Obama victory of 2008 that the future is bleak indeed for conservatives. This is doubly so if one accepts that the current liberal leadership of the technology Iront is a permanent fact of life. I don't believe it for a second.
But change comes doubly hard for conservatives. We do have a tough road indeed ahead of us.
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