Is the future of the Democratic Party leftist influencers? Is that even possible?

I've been thinking about this article all day.

My first thought is that we did have a network of leftist media that was broad, well-connected to the community, and very active: it was the alt-news. Alternative newspapers were very common and popular for decades, especially (but not only) in major cities. Most of them were extremely liberal or outright leftist. However, even the biggest publications in this category, like The Village Voice, collapsed or were acquired by big corporations that erased their voice. They have not been replaced.

Some of the alternative newspapers were indeed purchased by the ultra-rich. That didn't help preserve them. It isn't just that billionaires who are registered Democrat don't want to invest in leftist media (though that is absolutely a problem.). It's also that grant funders don't want to invest in leftist media. It is also that advertisers are afraid of showing up on "political" content after GamerGate successfully frightened them away from basic coverage.

We are in the aftermath of an active attack on the way that leftist journalists and commentators can make a living. It isn't accidental. It isn't just that they didn't keep up. It is intentional.

It's not just that the Right has ways to successfully fund its influencers. It's also that the right has successfully perpetrated a campaign to cut off funding at every possible level from leftist influencers and news.

This is only compounded by the Democrats failure to promote labor protections. The Right has even more support for defunding left-wing news via campaigning against minimum wage raises and support for M&A gobbling up small businesses. The result of the GOP's political agenda is that even the ecosystem of potential local advertisers and small-donation patrons are at risk and or entirely out of the mix as funding options.

As I thought about this more and more I came to a second thought: Leftist influencers by definition wouldn't work the same way either. The next generation of new media on the left is going to have to be a different shape by their very nature. They'd be co-ops like Defector, creator-owned alt projects like Nebula, or collectives like Pussy Riot.

The nature of leftist influence would work against right-wing individualism. They would not be solo acts. Leftist politics is, by philosophical nature, opposed to operations that scale like Joe Rogan. The question of the future of media on the left is complicated by this fact: not only do we not have a methodology to fund individualist influencers, we sort of don't want to run things that way either, right?

This complicates the problem because the big funders are, unlike the right-wing, not just unwilling to fund such projects, but ideologically opposed to their organization (where they are not just ideologically opposed to their values). It isn't just that leftist media won't deliver profit, it is that they will not stand for control. That friction of top down vs bottom up control has killed or ripped the heart out of the attempts at leftist media like HuffPost and Mic.

We can't run leftist influencers that operate counter to leftist ethics and politics. It needs to be cooperative, local, closer to the ground, and more community-based. Otherwise we end up with the same insane populist egotists but with different words in their scripts. That's a bad outcome. It also isn't sustainable, eventually those people will--by the nature of their organizational interests in continuing that particular job--turn right. Look no further than Red Scare for an example.

Presumably there are exceptions I suppose. But that's not what we want to work towards. We want a system for creating, building and maintaining leftist media that can grow and be successful. That can't come out of an approach that is, as far as the left should be concerned, ethically unsound.

I don't know what that looks like, I'm still thinking about this. Maybe I'll think about a solution in time. But we need to understand the problem first.

Without a network of culturally relevant influential content creators boosting and translating their messaging, the Democratic Party is rapidly losing credibility among younger, predominantly male audiences who have become ardent supporters of influencers that promote a distinctly conservative worldview.

This imbalance when it comes to online influence is no accident. It is the result of massive structural disadvantages in funding, promotion, and institutional support. And understanding why Democrats can't (or really won't) cultivate an equivalent independent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built is crucial for anyone who hopes to ever see the Democrats back into power.

The conservative media landscape in the United States is exceptionally well-funded, meticulously constructed, and highly coordinated. Wealthy donors, PACs, and corporations with a vested interest in preserving or expanding conservative policies strategically invest in right-wing media channels and up and coming content creators.