If I were to guess, I'd say the majority of quality bloggers are on the right. We've broken more stories, we were on the vanguard of blogging, and just like talk radio we more or less dominate it. I believe this to be true in part because we're better and more skilled, but also because with traditional media being dominated by the left, inroads were more or less impossible for us on the right to make. On the flip side of the same coin, since the left already dominated traditional media, there wasn't much incentive for them to enter and dominate the internet/bloggosphere. They already had an outlet.
But there is another force I believe that drives the quality and volume of the right leaning bloggosphere and that is the lousy economy. Frankly, what else do we have to do?
It's not like there's tons of jobs out there, let alone careers worth pursuing. If we were members of the left, we'd collect our unemployment checks and then complain about rich people and how we're entitled to their money. But we're not, we're on the right.
This means we have this nagging, annoying, persistence compulsion to do SOMETHING productive. We can't sit on our asses watching Maury Povich and soap operas like our lefter leaning counterparts can. We need to have some kind of measurable production at the end of the day. And blogging is the perfect outlet.
After spending 2 hours a day applying for jobs (that are there or are not available to us because we don't fit the progressively impossible HR wish list), an hour working out, and 2 hours running errands, a lot of us turn to the internet. And it's not just the unemployed, it's the underemployed, marginally employed, employed-but-not-engaged, and those of us working at "zombie firms" or government jobs where there's no work, just us showing up to participate in a trillion dollar Keynesian farce.
Thank god for them there interwebz, otherwise our minds would atrophy and maybe then we would watch Oprah or Maury or Chris Matthews.
Now, are all of us rock star bloggers like Glenn Reynolds or Powerline, etc.? No, of course not. But we are numerous, we are on average better quality and we are informing, educating and making other advances in informing the ignorant and debunking the left. So in a weird ironic sense, the worst thing that could happen to us (and the best thing for the lefter leaning segments of the blogging world) is for the economy to boom and give us something productive to do.
In this sense, there's an element of "balance" or "equilibrium." If the economy gets too bad, one of the automatic injectors is productive people who would have otherwise been employed, go and start blogging, starting Tea Party chapters and becoming politically involved. Over time (and because of our better skill set) our message penetrates the bunker-thick skulls of the average American voter, a Republican revolution of sorts occurs (Reagan, 1994 republicans, hopefully Romney, etc.) and pro-economic growth policies are enacted. Economy booms, we go away, until the current infants and toddlers grow up indoctrinated in leftist commie BS by the public schools, vote in socialist idiots, and we get to repeat the process all over again. Regardless of the socio-political generational cycles, today if the economy boomed, you'd lose probably about 50% of your really good conservative bloggers.
So, you know, all you lefty bloggers that don't like us and wish we'd go away. Just vote for Romney and Ryan this year, vote to eliminate corporate taxes and a balanced budget and BAAM! You can have teh interwebz.
In the meantime while your wonderful leader has made it that there's 8.3% unemployment and 11-18% underemployment, I guess we're here to stay because, well, we got nothing better to do.
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