The Twitter Problem

A plethora of Twitter paeans have been spilling out of conservative blogs everywhere. A recent (quite good) example can be found here.

Twitter is an oddity, and useful way to compress and receive your news from lots of different sites. It also seems to have some real uses for conferences and meetings – when some members are absent, tweets from twits across the hall can fly to keep them informed. Check out the TwitterCamp program for a nice example.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure this really answers the conservative problem. Twitter serves perfectly to net conservatives together, bringing the local knowledge from each and every point on the web to every other quickly. Wonderful – ignorance of their movements has always been a weapon in the progressive warchest. Knowledge can effectively constrain government superfluity, liberal excesses, and Democratic nonsense. We are powerless to contain that which we do not know.

And yet I wonder how much help this can really bring to our cause. David Frum appeared on Jamie Allman’s radio show this morning, and he pointed out that Republicans have a problem of demographics: there simply aren’t that many of us anymore. The conservative coalition that won the Cold War disintigrates before our eyes. The social conservatives have abandoned ship. A recent caller to a political office explained that her priest gave her permission to vote for Obama if abortion was her only concern. The classical liberals, the other half of the Conservative Coalition, are busy pontificating to each other in 140 characters or less about tax cuts. These are not answers.

Twitter is great. It’s cool. But it’s a tool for the conservative base, and the conservative base can’t muster enough votes to pick a conservative in the primaries, much less a national election. We don’t need to energize the base we already have, we need to convince people that we’re right. Those people won’t follow us on Twitter, they won’t listen to Michael Medved or Rush Limbaugh, and they won’t read my blog. These are methods of communication within the circle; we need to reach and convince the folks outside of the circle. They’re not here. They’re out there.

I don’t have answers, if I did I wouldn’t be writing a blog post at two in the morning for free. But I do have ideas of places to look, and none of those places are Twitter.