Why Is the Right So Good at Social Media?
Or, alternatively: Why doesn't the Left have a robust alternative media ecosystem like the Right?
Given my doctoral work studying conservative influencers, I usually get the question from folks in center-left or even working-class progressive politics, “Why can’t we have what they have? Where’s our Daily Wire?” Not that anyone on the Left wants Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens, but they want their “side’s” equivalent of a networked-influencer cabal ubiquitously visible on social media.
This question usually doesn’t come from some imagined “liberal” stereotype (people I love by the way): Prius-driving crunchy yuppies with “coexist” bumper stickers who listen to NPR and donate to PBS—folks who love public broadcasting and “local” media in the name of not using the Master’s Tools to dismantle the Master’s House.
Yet many people who identify as Democrats yearn for a networked personality ecosystem that is a bit more transgressive, bare-knuckled, pop-culture laden, or even crass. When it feels like more rights are being removed than bestowed by people who shout “Freedom!” there is a desire to have an insurgent media that fights extremism more head-on than staid, info-centric and sometimes cringey mainstream press.
In a part of my dissertation which I’m developing into a book, I address this question of why influencer-driven alternative media is so well cultivated, funded, and integrated into American conservatism. They have infrastructure and support that doesn’t analogously exist on the Left.
One answer lies in history with the story of a Right that found opportunity in defining itself in opposition to mainstream media — and funding efforts as such — since the New Deal. Alternative media activism is a dominant political strategy of the Right and it has been for most of the century. It is in their movement DNA.
In the past 80 years and through Southern Realignment, Conservatism has embraced their fringey personalities and alternative media, albeit at an arm’s length. They saw it as a source of cultural power they lost as bureaucratic liberals took over media, think tanks, and academia after the New Deal’s centrist consensus. Thus, conservatives resourced this alternative media with time, infrastructure, money, political access, and attention. The alternative media on the Right did not directly threaten corporatist or capitalist interests of the most powerful in conservatism—even if certain attitudes towards religion or race were liabilities to party image.
By contrast, the Liberal establishment in the past century, bound to corporatist or institutional interests as well as hampered by the legacy of Southern Democrats, have not embraced nor resourced their alternative media as part of a political strategy. They have had a warier relationship to “Left” alternative media that fought state-sanctioned racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, or bigotry. Often at risk of imprisonment or surveillance, these voices challenged both capitalism and legally inscribed white supremacy—things that Liberals for a lot of the 20th century upheld, sometimes loudly and sometimes quietly. The Liberal focus was on upholding their grip on institutional media — academia, network news, Hollywood, think tanks. In any case, the tenuous marriage between “liberals” and “progressives” is fairly recent. While the Liberals of today are seemingly different from the Liberals of yesteryear (and don’t get me started this week on what a “liberal” even is, definitionally), their lack-of-habit in funding alternative media still remains.
We can begin to tell this story with the New Deal.
*Academic historians who probably know things I left out (see my dissertation), please accept this as a generalized story that is highly derivative to tell a broader grand narrative of why alternative media exists so strongly on the Right!
The Shunning Impact of the New Deal Centrist Consensus
During the New Deal, concessions had to be made to develop a “centrist consensus” to modernize the country and pull millions out of poverty that the Great Depression had created. FDR could not have the New Deal looking like a socialist enterprise (despite it being one of the largest state-sponsored economic projects in our history) in the midst of a war against Nazis: socialist anti-Semites. Buy in from the private sector was also critical. Distancing from antisemitism was also key.
Thus, many on the fringes were left out of this new “centrist consensus” establishment order that would dominate academia, media, and government— “true conservatives" and “true socialists” alike. These included folks like anti-Semite, pro-Nazi and pro-New Deal radio host Father Coughlin. It also included pro-business, “America First,” anti-interventionist types, such as radio entrepreneur Clarence Manion. These highly popular “American Agitators” were relegated to the sidelines.
In the post-war years, outcast conservatives developed their own alternative media outlets in radio and newsletters, at first without much party support. When populist Barry Goldwater shocked establishment Republicans when he won the party’s presidential primary nomination in 1964, the party took note. Radio and newsletter “Media Activists” (as historian Nicole Hemmer has called them) were a huge source of populist power for Goldwater, accelerating him to fame. By this time the “Southern Realignment” of Southern Democrats becoming Republicans was in full swing.
The new Republican party embraced these alternative media personalities for their mailing lists as a means of tapping into the audiences that made up this emerging coalition of libertarians, evangelicals, and anti-communists: so-called “Big Tent” conservatism. It is no surprised that some of the first innovators in political direct-mail, like Richard Viguerie, were conservative entrepreneurs. These direct-mail innovators were Substack 1.0 — keeping track of their audience “metrics” while offering politicians and advertisers to have access to their lists. Personalities with big lists like anti-Equal Rights Amendment activist Phyllis Schlafy and her Eagle Forum (See Mrs. America for dramatized history) became useful to Republican politicians seeking to win.
Newsletters and radio weren’t the only media assets. The founding Human Events publisher, (yes, that Human Events now housing MAGA podcaster Jack Posobiec) Henry Regnery set up publishing houses for books appealing to conservative readership. This publisher still produces many popular books today.
Goldwater planted the seeds for what would become the Reagan Revolution in many ways. Before accepting President Richard Nixon’s nomination to the Supreme Court, conservative lawyer Louis Powell penned the Powell Memorandum (1971), which became a blueprint for the conservative movement’s creation of a labyrinth of think tanks and lobbying outfits, which would later include recognizable names like the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). As Alice O’Connor writes in her history of philanthropic social science, the memo was an important call for conservative activists and business leaders to go beyond an electoral-legislative-based political strategy and invest in building an intellectual, media, and cultural apparatus that could challenge the Democrats’.
Conservative organizations rallied around media activism as a strategy. The American Conservative Union, the organization that hosts CPAC, got started in 1974 and quickly became a bastion for “media boot camps” to train media activists. Young America’s Foundation (YAF - 1960) began touring conservatives on college campuses and later set up a journalism center that has trained many recognizable personalities of today.
Given all of this, alternative media was one of the main political organizing strategies for conservatism.
McCarthyism’s Blow to “Left” Media
After the New Deal and WWII, Cold War induced Red Scare. The hearings by Senator Joseph McCarthy snuffed out socialist, pro-labor, or communist sympathizers, media outlets and leadership who might have otherwise built out a “Left” media environment. These often included Black celebrities and civil rights leaders, whose own calls for racial and economic equality were seen as a vector for communist or socialist sympathies — not to mention a country that could still vaguely remember the Civil War and the tenuous unity of the nation. Thus, leadership in class and racial struggle at that time were often cut off at the knees, salt thrown in the soil of their legacy.
Unlike their right-wing counterparts who were usually speaking to the interests of white, suburban, and religious Americans who could afford a subscription to the Eagle Forum, “left-wing” outlets served poorer audiences and communities of color. These newsletters spoke about or served society’s most disadvantaged and most surveilled: working class folks trying to unionize, black folks, feminists. These were not audiences of suburbanites paying subscriptions for books and newsletters. By the time the 1960s-1970s Civil Rights Movement rolled around, many of its leaders, organizations, and news outlets had to fight tooth and nail for national attention to their cause, given they were often surveilled by government or sidelined by national media and Democratic institutions as Southern Realignment occurred. Often times, socialist leanings were downplayed while racial or gender equity was elevated — the beginning of the decoupling of identity politics from class consciousness.
The audiences of the Left did not have the resources to fund or uphold alternative media to the degree the Right did in this precious institution-building moment. Politically speaking, the Democratic Party tended to avoid its “radicals” as they tried to keep their centrist consensus power while the Republican Party seemingly embraced their alternative personalities in their Big Tent.
No more “Fair and Balanced:” Conservative TV and Radio
One scholar of right-wing media AJ Bauer has contended that the main (and perhaps only) unifying principle of post-war conservatism has been opposition to mainstream media; his robust POLITICO piece that details this history of why there is a strong conservative media activist culture is also good reading. Conservatives felt they were on the short end of the mainstream media stick, and despite there being a “Fairness Doctrine” they felt they were being treated unfairly by mass culture for their views.
Previously, the Fairness Doctrine had required anyone with a broadcast license to present issues of public importance with a variety of perspectives. Thus, when the Fairness Doctrine (1987) was repealed, conservatives could embrace media opposition as a political strategy — and big business. They threw “fair and balanced” to the wind, while embracing it as a brand. Post-repeal, conservative talk radio and soon conservative cable television like Fox News took off. Sean Hannity got his start in talk radio. Both of these media sourced talent from shock-jocks and tabloid television personalities; people forget that Bill O’Reilly got a leg-up in his career at Inside Edition. Roger Ailes actively recruited from tabloid-types who knew how to tell salacious stories in a working-class vernacular delivered by blonde and tanned news anchors with short skirts.
MSNBC — often dubbed “liberal” by right-wing press — did not engage this tabloid sensibility to the same degree as Fox. Their aesthetic and vernacular embraced a more institutional, collegiate, and white collar professional posture. Even if MSNBC wanted to offer the impression of representing stories of interest to the working man, did they talk like him?
Social Media
Even on social media, conservatives were more poised to succeed given the established history of local media activism and personality driven alternative media.
In The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Social Media Favors Conservatives, sociologist Jen Schradie puts forth a structural argument that conservative movement organizations generally hold more privilege, resources, and knowledge of digital organizing (read: computers) than local progressive organizations that usually comprise poorer, minority working class folks. By analyzing social movement organizations Left and Right around the topic of public sector unions, she saw how local conservatives (often older, wealthier, whiter business owners) often fared better in organizing than their progressive peers who were subject to surveillance, legal consequence, and lower-income. This went against the 2010’s assumptions that Liberals were better at tech: this might have been true on a national level in the Obama campaign, thanks to its ties to Silicon Valley start-ups and youthful techies. On a local level, it was almost the opposite.
That technocratic quant attitude of Obama-era liberal leaders was very adept at organizing Democrats online. But also remember the cultural moment: being liberal meant being anti-war in a time America was fighting very unpopular wars! It meant being transgressive and anti-establishment! Obama digital folks organized people online and got numbers — but they also did very little to sustain the digital army that brought them victory (see Micah Sifry’s piece on “Obama’s Lost Army” if you wanna get good and angry).
Throughout the Obama presidency, social media changed rapidly. It went from some cute Xanga and MySpace blogs on desktop computers to live feeds of your friends (and microcelebrities) doing things— all sitting on a device in the palm of your hand. This is where an entire separate chapter/newsletter should be written on contemporary social media by the Right—but I’ll give you a few more paragraphs.
In feeds and algorithms, social media privileged individual creators over institutional ones, personalities over collectives — not very “democratic” or “collective” in that sense. Even as mass movements could bubble up overnight on social media (Women’s March! Climate March! Occupy!), they were blips on the progressive/liberal radar and less the product of sustained organizing than the result of viral reactions to something bad happening—which means the image of their protest was more impactful than delivery of their oft-unfulfilled demands.
However, the personality-driven media of conservative alternative media — building for over 80 years by that point— really found its moment to shine because the tools benefited the inherent logic of their movement’s political strategy of networked influencers trolling the establishment. Media entrepreneurs like Andrew Breitbart, Steve Bannon, and Ben Shapiro (all colleagues at one point) took cues from decades of alternative media and tabloid style to create attention grabbing content in semi-closed ecosystems of recognizable personalities.
As internet trolls found a playbook in doing the most outrageous things to get attention in a kind of post-modern nihilist pursuit for personal meaning in a generation already troubled by the Iraq War and the Financial Crisis of 2008, conservatives found common cause with their tactics. Do the outrageous to get the attention of the loathsome mainstream media—to also gain the attention of the nation to your cause.
I’m sure you can do the math on where and to whom these tactics led.
Tl;Dr: Conservatives Think Mainstream Institutions Hated Them, So They Built Their Own
This is one structural narrative to understanding why the Right has decades of infrastructural and financial advantage over the Left when if comes to social media and alternative media. We could also go into rhetorical and stylistic developments, such as the Right’s embrace of certain working class cultural tropes, lifestyle interests, language, or entertainment (for this I leave you to Reece Peck and his book Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism As Working Class). The Right’s embrace of transgressivity as a style (“Conservativsm is the new punk rock!” “We’re the anti-war party now!”) means many influencers fashion themselves as heirs to 1960s freedom fighters—while simultaneously dissing those “dirty” hippies.
But main takeaway: in thinking about why the Right seems so “good” at this, remember that they have decades of experience, heritage, and habituated subscribers in this alternative media game that the Left simply doesn’t have at the same scale!
For further reading, I highly recommend:
There are so many little nuances and twists and turns to this narrative that could be added. But I remind you this is a blog, a SUBSTACK, good sir. It is here to help folks get some ideas to inspire further inquiry into more robust sources, like these:
Claire Bond Potter, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us On Politics and Broke Our Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2020)
Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (New York: Verso, 2021 [1949])
Reece Peck, Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism As Working Class (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
I am of course open to corrections!