Culture shock: what happened when one conservative Web site ventured outside the movement bubble.

• Author: Homans, Charles

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Last May, Conor Friedersdorf, a twenty-eight-year-old recent graduate of NYU's Journalism School, decided he was going to save conservative journalism. His manifesto, which appeared under the title "Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism" in the online edition of Doublethink, a magazine published by a small right-of-center foundation, began by allowing what most conservatives already believed: the mainstream media tilts to the left. "Contra the least-thoughtful conservative critics," however, "there isn't any elite liberal conspiracy at work." The source of the bias was something far more subtle: "The right," Friedersdorf wrote, "has a problem with narrative."

This wasn't entirely conservatives' fault, he wrote--the story of, say, a destitute family's eviction from its apartment made for better copy than the explanation of why rent control was a bad idea from a societal perspective. But conservative writers, he argued, had themselves to blame, too. They were bad at telling stories. Operating forever in the shadow of National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., they had spent half a century honing their rhetorical chops on the romantic notion that an argument, framed eloquently and forcefully enough, could change the course of history. Worse, these arguments tended to be advanced in right-wing publications that made little effort to attract a general audience, devolving into an exercise of limited interest to anyone not already locked inside the echo chamber.

Friedersdorf had a different idea in mind. "I'm not sure another Buckley's what we really need," he wrote. "Instead, I'd prefer another Tom Wolfe, or better yet a dozen. As his generation's conservative commentators railed against The Great Society, insisting its urban antipoverty programs encouraged radicalism, bred dependence on the welfare state, and ignored the root causes of unemployment, Mr. Wolfe did something different: reporting." Wolfe had gone to the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein's cocktail party, watched Park Avenue's finest flatter themselves by sharing hors d'oeurves with Black Panthers, and wrote about it in scathing detail, first in New York magazine--the cover featured three white socialites in glittery cocktail dresses with raised fists--and later in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. In doing so, Friedersdorf believed, Wolfe had made a far stronger case for conservatism than the collected works of L. Brent Bozell. And Wolfe hadn't had any need to work within the confines of a conservative shadow institution; writing in New York and Esquire, he had reached and potentially persuaded an audience that didn't subscribe to Buckley's National Review. In sum, Friedersdorf wrote, "the right must conclude that we're better off joining the journalistic project than trying to discredit it."

Shortly after he wrote it, Friedersdorf's "Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism" came to the attention of David Kuo, President Bush's former point man for faith-based initiatives, who had left the administration unhappily and went on to write Tempting Faith, the most personal of the dissenting White House memoirs of the Bush years. Kuo had come to believe that the Republican Party's recent adventure with near-unchecked political power had left conservatives with a lot of soul-searching to do, and he wanted to provide them a place to do it. He and his former boss, veteran culture warrior William J. Bennett, were thinking of starting a social networking site for values voters. The project's loss leader, they decided, would be a modestly ambitioned online magazine, a kind of right-of-center Slate, tentatively called LibertyWire, and they hired a former Mike Huckabee campaign staffer and blogger named Joe Carter to be its managing editor. LibertyWire's founders were all committed evangelicals, and Carter, who had once run a small newspaper in East Texas, envisioned the site as a place where social conservatives could talk about culture--a safe zone between the purely political critiques of the conservative media and the secular liberal criticism that dominated the mainstream media, neither of which answered the questions he wanted answered about television and movies. "The Christian culture has the 'shit counters': the people who say, 'This movie has thirteen bad words,' or whatever," Carter told me. "We didn't want to do that. We thought there was a real audience for criticism of books, TV, and movies by people who actually liked books, TV, and movies."

Kuo and Carter also wanted to attract a younger generation of conservative writers, and thought Friedersdorf would be a good start; "Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism" played to the soft spot both of them had for the New Journalism of the '70s. Ditching the LibertyWire moniker--it sounded like a John Birch Society newsletter--they re christened the site Culture11, after a list of eleven areas of culture they wanted it to encompass, and debuted quietly on August 20. The project fit the needs of the moment--Bush's approval ratings were below freezing, the presidential campaign was Barack Obama's to lose, and Republicans were unlikely to avoid a rout in both houses of Congress. It was an opportunity for a healthy retreat from politics for serious and thoughtful conservatives, a chance to sort out who they were and what they...