tea bag

photo by cnbellman

Several years ago, in response to the formation of "Pajamas Media," I coined the phrase wingnut welfare. Though it became applied more broadly over time, I was trying to succinctly describe the transactional relationship between the conservative infrastructure and right wing bloggers, who were basically being paid regardless of merit to spread propaganda:

They are not there to make a profit. There is no "business model" involved. And every criticism they all laid at the feet of every East German factory worker after the toppling of the Berlin wall — they have no ability to work in a competitive environment, they know they will never be fired — comes into play. They’re fools, but they’re subsidized fools. They never have to worry about traffic, they never have to be even a little bit clever or creative or think or even spell right.

All they have to do is continue to repeat what they’re told.

Those who profited from this — "right wing robber barons trying to preserve their privilege of feeding at the taxpayer trough" — could easily afford this minimal expense because they made boatloads of money gaming the system. From bank deregulation to bankruptcy laws to no-bid defense department contracts, the profits were huge. A new study says that lobbyist money spent in 2004 for a single tax break earned a 22,000% return on investment. The money that trickled down into the right wing blogosphere was relatively insignificant. Over time it probably stunted its growth as the audience interested in listening to "George Bush, right or wrong" ultimately dwindled, but that isn’t something their GOP patrons cared about.

The tea baggers taking to the streets may seem remarkably incoherent to us, because their "fiscal responsibility" only kicked in after Barack Obama took the oath of office. I didn’t really understand it and dismissed it as pathological authoritarianism until I read a post by James Joyner about a month ago:

Jules Crittenden is shocked that lefty firebrands Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald have continued ranting and raving about injustice now that their guy is in charge over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

One possible explanation for this is that, rather than having simply been partisan hacks fomenting faux outrage at the Bush Administration, they’re intellectually honest ideologues who are genuinely motivated by principle and actually outraged when their government violates said principles.

During the Bush years, the right wing was playing a zero sum game, and they thought we were, too. Support "your guy" when he’s in the White House, oppose "their guy" when he’s not. To be sure, there are many in the Democratic camp willing to forgive things in the Obama Administration they excoriated George Bush for, though I’m not sure I’d call them the "left." Regardless, go over to Daily Kos right now — those aren’t the dominant voices on the liberal side of the blogosphere.

After I read that, the teabaggers made more sense. The thing they’re pissed about is that it’s not their turn to steal. They assume that extending voting rights or social services or health care or food stamps or immigration rights is not done out of a sense of principle, but because Democrats are simply trying to grow (or "pay off") their voter base. Where we see a single mother getting food stamps, they see Richard Mellon Scaife.

So, when Greg Sargent wrote yesterday about liberals bloggers upset because liberal interest groups weren’t factoring us in their advertising budgets or thinking about participating in financially sustainable models, right wing bloggers thought it was an acknowledgment that we were printing propaganda and wanted to be paid for it. Because that’s very much how they operate. (Though it should be noted that only the smaller blogs wrote about the piece — most of the biggies didn’t want to address the fact that they themselves are heavily subsidized through a variety of means.)

Let’s try this again. Liberal blogs operate in a capitalist system. Our success depends on traffic, and we aren’t paid to print White House talking points. We get paid for advertising. Eugene Volkh, whose career as an academic he acknowledges gives him limited experience in this realm, worries about a lack of "transparency." Here’s the transparency — you look and see the ads running on a particular site, just as you would the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

If you’re Christian Dior and you want your clothes in Vogue, you have an interest in making sure Vogue is there tomorrow and the next day, so you buy advertising. If the New York Times Book Review section is an important part of your plan to sell books, there is a symbiotic interest in making sure your products are on display there, it isn’t an attempt to purchase a positive review. So when the AARP announces a million dollar ad campaign to promote health care, and then sends us a press release assuming they’ll get free exposure on the blogs, what’s wrong with this picture?

I guess you’d have to understand how capitalism and the free market work to get it.