Conservative Organizations

Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, defined the conservative tradition as a critique of ideology in politics. The critique is grounded in a distinction made by Scottish philosopher David Hume, who was the first to launch a systematic critique of modern ideologies by comparing what he called “true philosophy” to “false philosophy.”

While it is often assumed that conservative organizations are less likely than liberal organizations to benefit from the horizontal fluidity of social networks as opposed to the vertical constancy of social context, this belief is mistaken. For one thing, conservative organizations often emphasize the individual apart from social context, whereas liberal organizations often emphasize social context as the basis for the individual. For another, social networks can and often do accommodate combinations of hierarchy and horizontality, and conservative organizations utilize them effectively. George W. Bush's convergence of previously separate law enforcement and intelligence organizations into the Department of Homeland Security is one of the best examples of this. While the emphasis was on opening up lines of communication between central and peripheral nodes, they did not eliminate hierarchy as such, but rather introduced a greater flexibility within the institutional hierarchy. For both reasons, while it is true that liberal organizations have often utilized social networks more readily than conservative organizations, no summary statement can be made about the topic in general.

Nevertheless, in the context of social networks, the real divergence between liberal and conservative organizations is not that one engages social networks and the other does not, but that while the former benefits most from all-channel networks, the latter tend toward mixed networks that are usually of the chain or hub variety—where some nodes connect to all others, or in which each is connected, but indirectly. Only occasionally do they delve into all-channel networks. Another important quality is that because social networks are based on multiple potential connections between individuals, and because individuals are often what University of California–Berkeley professor George Lakoff calls “biconceptual” (people who have both conservative and liberal worldviews), they are as likely to benefit conservative organizations as they are liberal organizations. Often, the same person will be linked to the former as well as the latter through a social network that is multiply linked, particularly in the case of individuals who engage multiple social identities simultaneously. The phenomenon of political independents in the United States, especially individuals who may vote for Barack Obama in one instance or Ron Paul in another, is an example of this. For all of these reasons, it is important to understand social networks not simply as the domain of liberal organizations that emphasize all-channel connectivity but also that of their conservative counterparts, which engage social networking but not in the manner of liberal organizations.

While all-channel networks have typically held sway within the extraparliamentary left and have recently begun to do so within their parliamentary equivalent, the right has typically engaged chain and hub networks within both electoral and nonelectoral wings, opting for all-channel forms at key moments. More recently, however, the rise of the Internet has made possible selective connectivity between chain and hub as well as [Page 166]all-channel networks, particularly after its Web 2.0 version converged earlier communication mediums into newly all-channel, networked ones. Conservative organizations' ties to established structures, in other words, require their involvement in both social networks and hierarchies. But because social networks become more complex along with the relative breakdown of hierarchies, the primary division here is the same as with liberal organizations: that between the parliamentary and the extraparliamentary. Within the former, the relation of the Republican Party to the Christian Coalition and the nascent but burgeoning Tea Party is probably most telling.

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