Update from the editors: We felt that this post needed some backstory so others could see the behavior of the people Mark refers to here. Please read this post for additional context.

I watched with horror Tuesday as the worst President in modern history won re-election handily. I have been going through the days since in a fog. Not just because I can’t believe the stupidity of people - I can, really - but because I’m realizing I knew all along what we were doing wrong, and I’m starting to realize we deserved to lose this election.

Moments in history like this, where we are defeated, broken, and in retreat, are opportunities to reflect on why we were defeated, and we must learn from our mistakes. Having been largely ignored by the conservative new media community, I feel I have a uniquely clear view of what these problems are. And like I always have, I’ll try to outline those mistakes below, but I doubt enough people will listen.

You Won’t Listen to Me Because of my Social Media Status

I have approximately 430 followers on Twitter. I have approximately 260 “friends” on Facebook. I don’t routinely post pointless, populist emotional tripe like “Obama’s gotta go!” to the cheers of the masses, expressed in “Likes” and retweets. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I don’t spend all day preaching to the choir. And I don’t drag all of you into disproportionately-important righteousness-laced arguments with internet trolls, spending all my time legitimizing people who are instigators first, and “liberals” probably fourth or fifth.

I make content that takes multiple listens to fully appreciate. As a lifelong fan of music, I understand innately that this is what makes true art wonderful. You haven’t finished its experience after one look, or one listen. I don’t make parodies, I don’t write about Jesus, I never once considered writing a lyric like “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.” I’m not a 22-year-old anorexic with ironic hair and thick-rimmed glasses that have plain window glass in them. By all accounts, despite a strong conservative, almost federalist streak, and a healthy understanding of how leftism has destroyed everything it touches in all of history, I feel like I’m tweeting, posting, writing, and singing to a brick wall.

Whether you made a conscious decision not to follow me, or you didn’t know about me because some social media “superstar” didn’t tell you about me, you didn’t consider me one of the important voices of the movement.

If you were right, then how did we lose?

You Will Listen to Others Because of Their Social Media Status, and Follow Them Right Off The Cliff

The numbers don’t lie; the ones on our side who do these things are superstars. But now I’m wondering, if our superstars are so awesome, how did we lose?

Andrew Breitbart, who for the last six moths of his life posted nothing but fights with anyone who would call him a crystal meth addict or “faggot,” still has more than 86,000 followers on Twitter alone, eight months after his death. The people who run his website empire, who claim to be his friends, routinely insult, harass, and attack other conservatives on social media. Simply disagreeing with Breitbart’s social media tactics, and wishing I could’ve talked positive strategy with him when he was alive, got me blacklisted from appearing on his sites by editor Larry O’Connor, who accused me of “pissing on Andrew’s grave” by holding this opinion. Meanwhile, the Breitbart web empire gives endless free publicity to the left, carefully documenting every anti-conservative thing they say and do, and finding convenient opportunities to silence content creators on our side. Their example vindicates our opponents, verifying the leftist stereotype that conservatives care about nothing except hating everyone who disagrees with them.

Michelle Malkin, who has approximately 450,000 Twitter followers, runs a site called “Twitchy” where she routinely posts about supposed attacks directed at her - often from conservatives - in the third person. She refers to herself as “Twitchy founder and CEO” as she outlines in graphic detail & excessive name-calling the “meanies” who dare criticize her. She routinely plays the gender card, the way Obama supporters play the race card, opining repeatedly that anyone who legitimately disagrees with her opinion or her tactics must be afraid of a “strong woman” who built a successful business. A business, by the way, whose primary product is now the retelling of Breitbartian internet slap-fights and the convenient application of victimology to the strong, perfect, infallible “Twitchy founder and CEO.” Like the Breitbart empire, Malkin gives strength to the left’s stereotype that Republicans are the party of hatred, and supports the liberal talking points that all women are victims of jealous, bitter misogynists, and no one can disagree with a woman except if he is a sexist pig.

These are only two shameful examples. Dana Loesch (81,000+ followers) offers more of the same, focusing solely on the “look at those mean liberals” paradigm, and attacking those on her side who don’t fall in line. Her husband Chris Loesch routinely brags about helping conservative new media figures, especially in my field of music, “more than anyone” in the “movement.” Not only has he never “helped” me or hundreds of others who do what I do, but responded with attacks and encouraged his followers to do the same (which, in case you need to be told, is cowardly) when I mentioned to someone that he was not who he claimed to be. When I finally blocked him on Twitter, since the service allows me no other way to hide assholes who write 57-tweet diatribes against me from my mentions, he apparently wondered aloud to his followers how he could possibly help me now that I’d blocked him. FreedomWorks, who claims that taking back the culture is part of their mission, has never replied to me, nor supported the work I do; but whenever I mention them, a few people I’ve never heard of come out of the woodwork to attack me.

The list goes on and on. Glenn Beck ignored my offers of music for eight years, then suddenly last year decided that we needed to control the culture to win elections. After he invited his listeners, in the worst economy of our lifetimes, to fly to Israel to see him speak, he began to ask the “artists” in his audience to write him an essay about why their art was worth his attention. His listener base moves a book to the #1 spot on Amazon’s bestseller list within minutes of his mere mention, but he refuses to look past the written word for people who can help the movement. Even Rush Limbaugh played a “conservative musician” on his show last week. Sadly, it was someone who does exactly what his friend Paul Shanklin does - lowest-common-denominator parody music with an expiration date.

We Proudly Work Inside a Liberal Construct But Decry Community Organizing as a Democrat Thing

Despite the Internet being created prior to Al Gore’s involvement as a fault-tolerant network by the military, the modern Internet has been designed and guided by liberal principles. Without cost of entry, without hard work, “everyone” could have an “equal” voice on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, UStream, LiveStream, Blogger, and a hundred other free services. The Internet is a true democracy, in that when everyone can do something, everyone does. This sort of thinking seems to lead people to a false premise: the cream will rise to the top. In actuality, the opposite happens: “Fail” videos, mob mentality, and emotional populism rises to the top. The lowest common denominator rules.

Publishing costs have dropped to zero but creation costs still exist, meaning that someone who wants to make good content (say, an album, a TV series, or a book; things that take time, people, and resources) can’t keep up with those who publish garbage. Whether it’s crying into a camera screaming “Leave Britney Alone!” or retweeting someone who hates Andrew Breitbart or disagrees with Michelle Malkin, these things can be accomplished almost instantly. Responses, themselves tantrums and retweets, also happen nearly instantly, and the consumer is fed a steady diet of junk food. When all you eat is junk food, you become unhealthy and obese, and you increase the risk of early death. What do you think will happen when all your brain consumes is intellectual junk food?

Not understanding this, the “superstars” of our “movement” pat themselves on the back as they create their garbage, and promote each other in a disgusting type of crony conservatism. They use the Internet and its liberal-democracy paradigm to share each other’s content, and perhaps out of a jealousy of real content creators, close ranks with each other, deathly afraid someone will learn about quality content they can’t or won’t create. Imagine that: They tell you that individualism is the most basic tenet of our ideology, but they’re only successful because they belong to a network of sycophants who favor quantity over quality and know how to hit the “retweet” button. What kind of world do we live in when conservatives aren’t even conservatives?

We are - or we should be - a community. Communities sometimes need organization. Because Barack Obama bragged about being a “community organizer,” we have decided that no community should ever be organized lest we be thought of as leftists. And it’s no surprise that our community falls back to mob rule, lowest-common-denominator, 50.00001% majority, pure unadulterated democracy. We refuse to educate our community past “retweet the person who says ‘Obama sucks’ every day.” Pure democracies don’t work. We prove it every day.

The “mainstream media” was a content aggregator, and we rejected it in order to build a better world. But we live in a new world created by leftist principles of “leveling the playing field,” which creates content overload. So we turn again to content aggregators out of necessity. We can’t possibly know about everything that is going on, and we put our trust in full-time politicos to get the best of the best. Those content aggregators - Malkin, Beck, Breitbart and his ilk, Loesch, and others - have failed us by allowing only their own cream to rise to the top, terrified that they would lose their success if their followers knew of the quality content they’re missing.

Sometimes, Ideological Superiority Can Destroy Us

What happens when you have to defeat an ideological nightmare like Barack Obama, but your movement is filled with strong-willed partisans who have been inundated with liberal new-media messages that their own voice is the most important one, and carries exactly equal weight as anyone else’s? Infighting and division. We had a mission here: Defeat Barack Obama. Mitt Romney was far from the perfect candidate. He wouldn’t have moved the needle to the right as much as Reagan did, but here’s the thing our side forgot, and the thing that lost us the election: He would have moved the needle to the right more than Obama. Nobody ever claimed Romney was a Libertarian. Many on our own side called him a Neocon. They cast their votes for Gary Johnson, or not at all; some wrote in Ron Paul.

We’re already seeing that Gary Johnson got enough votes in Florida to allow Obama, whose supporters were unified, to take the state. I’m certain we’ll see some other states that went to Obama as a result of people voting for a third-party candidate, or staying home because Romney wasn’t conservative enough. We are so strong-willed as to be foolish at times like this. It is ideologically ignorant to believe this will teach the GOP a lesson; we’ve seen time and time again that it won’t. They’ll move the party left toward independents, believing that the Johnson and Paul voters won’t ever be satisfied enough with a candidate to vote for him or her. And I don’t blame them. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

We must also do something about those in our movement whose success depends on having a far-left Democrat in power, or the people who can ride out another four years of this nutjob, or can survive while purposely fucking the country to make a political point that won’t have the intended effect anyway. I’m dirt poor; I can’t get out of upstate New York, which is the bluest of the blue states; and people keep telling me I’m really smart and really talented. If that’s the case, I’m too talented to succeed, because I am suffering out here while simpletons with flags and a misandrist victim mentality are running our movement. If you can ride out another Obama term, I can’t relate to you.

The two-party system in the United States is flawed, but so are all other options. Having a third party which is ideologically similar to one of the major parties always splits the vote with that party.

We Are Apparently Content To Fuck Ourselves

Throughout this whole “new media revolution,” it seems we couldn’t agree on anything. I feel like we fought with each other more than we fought our ideological opponents. Yes, it felt good at times to smack down an ignorant, loudmouthed leftist, but I am now consumed with the feeling that maybe we were the ignorant loudmouths all along. As it became obvious on this past Tuesday that Barack Obama would be re-elected, all the old wounds re-opened: Breitbart’s loss of focus, his acolytes’ intra-party bigotry; Malkin’s self-serving, “working mom surrounded by misogynists” neofeminist victimology; Chris Loesch’s insistence that he was “helping” me by following me on Twitter for five months, during which time I was producing an album in a vacuum with no support, and never once interacting with me; and our side’s constant infighting over who was a real conservative and who was not, based on whether they were supporting Romney or a third party who would split our vote.

We had our fun, we fought like animals, we poured out everything in our hearts. And guess what? We not only got fucked, but we fucked ourselves.

I’m all for an intense scrutiny of all the options, all the choices, and all the variances in ideology. But we have to ask ourselves: At the end of the day, is our independence as different flavors of conservatism so important that, in preserving it all the way to the ballot, we hand a victory to our opponent? If the answer is “yes,” I’m not sure I can stand with you. We might as well abort every last one of our fetuses; the movement will be destroyed before they’re out of adolescence.

So what do we do?

I think I know, but I’m afraid that I could never reach enough people or be charismatic enough to lead us away from the cliff toward which we are still sprinting - proudly, I might add. The conservative movement has to figure out what it wants. I can only articulate what I want. But what good is that? If it isn’t what a vast majority of conservatives want, is there even a point in reciting it?

I’ll just tell you what I know at this point: We could’ve won this. Our content aggregators and our new media pundits are peddling hatred of the other side instead of the ideas of our side. Malkin, Beck, the Loesches, the remaining acolytes of Andrew Breitbart, and any other so-called conservative peddler of lowest-common-denominator crap need to be hoisted on their own petards. We need to educate our masses that constant, unending criticism of the left and nothing else results in what we’ve got right now.

We need to look at things from a businesslike perspective. Say there’s a really successful business, providing the best, highest-quality product in their market, and doing well. Say that the CEO is a conservative, but admitting it to his customers would cause his business to fail. Tell me, what possible fucking good would that do?

We also have to look at the business side of it the other way: Are there people on our side whose entire business model depends on there being someone in the White House to tear down? Does another four years of Obama, where we all suffer financially, emotionally, and ideologically, guarantee them four more years of business success? I’m all for the free market, but I’ll do my part not to support people who try to profit off my pain while lying to me about their ideological center.

We can commiserate amongst ourselves, but I think the flag-waving, uber-patriotic, on-the-nose, in-your-face conservatism pushed into the faces of people who aren’t fervently conservative works just about as well as walking up to random people at an airport and saying “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” Not doing that doesn’t mean you don’t love Jesus any more or less, it just means that you haven’t blown the opportunity to win others over with a shitty, discomforting approach.

Like I said, I can only talk about what I know. I work in the realm of sound and music. But for one thing, I’d like to see someone in our movement start a record label for people like me. Internally, we could all be conservatives and go get a beer and talk politics. But outwardly, we would simply be a label that supports good, high-quality product, with a focus, perhaps a private one, toward musicians who happen to be conservative. We seem to assume that some liberal douchebag will change his ideology based solely on our existence and our hackneyed cheerleading. Maybe, just maybe, if he hears the music first, and it’s about something he cares about (like family or love or loss or confusion, or anything we all experience regardless of our political stripes), and the song gets in his head and won’t leave, and he ends up loving the song, then maybe when he finds out the artist is a conservative, he’ll be faced with a situation I know I’ve been faced with since I started listening to music as a child - he’s now forced to take the artist seriously, when he hasn’t had to take any conservative seriously before in his life.

There is a way to stick to our ideology and not all appear as extremist nutjobs to everyone who isn’t a diehard conservative. We can do it without changing anything we believe. We can do it without pandering to any group, be it women, Hispanics, or simply “undecided voters.” Hating Obama isn’t a product. Shouting “baby killer!” at a pro-choicer isn’t an ideology. Living the common experience that is life and approaching it from a different set of values can help us put our ideology in a better light, so it isn’t repugnant to everyone but the most hard-core right-winger.

We must stop fighting and attacking people with whom we agree 90% of the time. We must be better judges of character. We must reject populist tripe. We must reject the pundits who brought us here. The Malkins, the Breitbarts, the Loesches have made us bullies, who lash out in constant paranoia at the supposed reds in our ranks. We must demand better product from our content producers. We must address our almost-sexual arousal at the deluge of liberal hatred from our new media celebrities. This isn’t professional wrestling, folks. Actions, decisions, and ideologies have consequences beyond the end of some contrived feud.

That’s all I know today. I have a feeling I will lose more followers, “friends,” whatever, than if I’d kept my mouth shut and let the lowest-common-denominator assholes in our movement continue their reigns unchallenged. But now, if it isn’t too late, we need to figure out what we agree on, package it better than an Apple product, a Justin Beiber album, or an Aaron Sorkin drama, and get it into people’s hands.

If we can’t, I truly believe we’re finished.

(See you on Twitchy, between frightened comments about my manhood and my songwriting ability!)

About Mark Scudder

Mark Scudder is a singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who happens to be conservative. Not a fan of parodies, praise music, trite flag-waving, or hot country, Mark's poignant lyrics, epic arrangements, and studio-grade production has been largely ignored by conservative new media celebrities. Undaunted, Mark's most recent release, "The Solution is the Problem," was recorded and produced entirely in front of a live camera, streamed for fans and friends on the Internet.

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culture war, kulturkampf