Blogs for Victory’s Matt Margolis has some thoughts on the future of the conservative movement (who the hell doesn’t these days?) and they make an interesting read.

This blog post was a long time coming. With the disastrous election behind us, the conservative blogosphere has an opportunity to play a role in delivering the Republican Party out of the wilderness… if we’re up to the challenge. Right now, however, I don’t think we are.

2004 was a good year for us, but it has been downhill ever since. The conservative blogosphere has become a series of self-serving cliques rather than a movement-serving community.
. . .
Conservative blogging used to be about building community. But it has become something that is elitist, DC-centric, and contrary to grassroots empowerment.

I don’t really agree with this and neither did Jon Henke at the Next Right:

This is exactly backwards. The Rightosphere has never been about “community”. Some Right-of-center blogs have developed sizable communities in the form of comment sections (LGF, Malkin, Hot Air), but very few right-of-center blogs have developed genuine, interactive, participatory communities. Red State has been a diary/community site for quite some time, though (for a variety of reasons) never approaching the size of Daily Kos. Next Right is a diary/community site, but still much newer and smaller. The Rightosphere has been about media criticism and punditry, not community and activism.

And the Rightosphere has never been DC-centric and elitist. Many of the prominent Lefty bloggers are DC residents, but very, very few of the prominent Righty bloggers are based in DC. Glenn Reynolds (Knoxville), Ed Morrissey and Powerline (Minneapolis), Pajamas, Volokh and Red State (scattered), RealClearPolitics (Chicago). The people behind The Next Right are an exception, but the point of this site is that Ruffini, Dayton and I are in the unusual position of being at the nexus between the political world and the internet media.

It’s difficult for non-DC bloggers to do DC-centric things, of course, but the Leftosphere became powerful by going outside of the Democratic establishment.

To which Sean Oxendine responds, also at the Next Right:

The gist of Jon’s post here is that if you want to make a difference in the rightosphere, cut back on the punditry and rev up the activism. I couldn’t agree more. As I’ve written before, it’s embarrasing that we apparently had a close race with an outstanding candidate in NY-24, and he didn’t show up on any race-watcher’s radar screen. If we don’t have people on the ground looking for signs momentum from serious, articulate candidates, the people at the top will never know where to direct energy, attention, and eventually money.

My thoughts? This is what the conservative blogosphere does well, this conversation right here. In 1976 after Reagan failed to take the GOP nomination for president away for heir apparent Gerald Ford (in a longshot bid at best) this conversation took months, if not years to take place and percolate throughout the conservative intellectual circles of the day. Now in 2008, in the wake of a crushing defeat far worse than the ones conservatives suffered back in 1976 we are going to be able to refine our ideas, rebuild our intellectual foundation and come to a consensus on what is to be done in an extremely short time frame, with ideas more finely honed than ever.

Better yet, larger numbers of conservatives are involved in this process than ever before. We may not organize as well as the liberals do (they are groupthink sheep afterall) but we do have some of the most powerful, intense dialogues running at the moment. It is our fractious, independent debate that makes us strong because it is the power of ideas that wins the day in political movements. When this debate is finally concluded the GOP and conservative movement that emerges out of the ashes will be far stronger than any the left has yet faced and it will be in large part because of the efforts taken here, on the right side of the blogosphere (hat-tip: Club for Growth).