In the span of just six weeks, conservative angst over the comparatively feeble state of the right-wing blogosphere has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. After first trumpeting the supposed decline in traffic at liberal blogs, conservative heads nodded in agreement as Red State's Erick Erickson blamed abortion and capitalism for the abysmal state of the right's online presence.
But for all of its hand-wringing, the right-wing blogosphere may be on the verge of a boom. After all, as they'll hopefully learn this November, nothing could be better for grassroots expansion online than a crushing defeat at the polls casting the Republican Party and its right-wing water carriers out of power and into opposition.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) two weeks ago, Erickson's culture war theory for the flaccid state of the right-wing online machine both dropped jaws and provided comic relief. As Ars Technica reported:

Erick Erickson, editor of the popular conservative megablog RedState, conceded that progressives currently enjoy an advantage over conservatives online - though he attributed it to an asymmetry in free time, since conservatives "have families because we don't abort our kids, and we have jobs because we believe in capitalism."

While this adolescent rant hardly merits a response, its timing was interesting. Just a few weeks earlier, the conservative goosestepatariat crowed over data from SiteMeter showing that leading liberal blogs such as DailyKos, Crooks & Liars, FireDogLake, Eschaton and Hullabaloo had experienced traffic declines while Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, HotAir and other leading members of the Republican amen corner experienced gains.
As they alternately swing from manic depressive extremes of joy to despair over the persistent liberal edge online, the conservative blogosphere might want to pause and reflect on how they got here and why their prospects are inevitably going to improve.
A first explanation can be called Colbert's Law. In 2006, Stephen Colbert famously told President Bush that "reality has a well-known liberal bias." In a nutshell, the blogosphere excels at unearthing lies, identifying wrong-doing and shining a spotlight on hypocrisy. As voters made clear in the 2006 midterm rout, such pathologies right now are overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) the province of the Bush White House and its Republican Party allies.
So while liberal blogs exposed the lies and criminality of Jack Abramoff, PlameGate, NSA domestic surveillance and more, the White House enlisted both right-wing radio hosts and bloggers in its transparent attempt to produce its own reality. Former Bush communications director Dan Bartlett admitted as much when he described Hugh Hewitt and other compliant bloggers of the right:

"That's what I mean by influential. I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It's a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we've cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on."

As conservative bloggers may now be beginning to realize, that's just one difference between being an independent check on the party in power and merely being its appendage.
Further hampering the development of the right-wing blogosphere is the conservative movement's reliance on other media distribution channels. In Fox News, after all, the right has its own television network. And as John McCain is learning to his great discomfort, right-wing hosts dominate talk radio. A 2007 study by the Center for American Progress documented that conservative shows provide 91% of the weekday talk radio content overall, including 76% in the top 10 media markets nationwide. Those right-wing distribution alternatives also include the vast network of churches Karl Rove and the GOP appropriated in the successful effort in 2004 to ensure the reelection of President Bush.
Of course, a more fundamental challenge for the conservatives is the staggering unpopularity of their movement. It's not just that President Bush is only slightly more popular than the Ebola virus and that Americans overwhelmingly believe the country is on the wrong track. Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans in generic match-ups for President and Congress, and they trust Democrats more on virtually every issue.
Also to the dismay of the right, data suggesting a decline of the liberal blogosphere even as the conservative online presence grows are ambiguous at best. While liberal sites like DailyKos may have seemingly reached a plateau, issues of timing and technology may explain the apparent drop-off.
First, readers simply have a lot more choices in the rapidly maturing liberal blogosphere. The recent "Blogroll Amnesty Day" again showed that there are so many liberal sites to link to that leading destinations such as Eschaton and DailyKos have largely given up trying to filter them all. More importantly, as Kos noted, the explosive growth of RSS feeds is driving sizable traffic increases not monitored by SiteMeter and others monitoring web metrics. Since October, DailyKos has seen RSS subscriptions jump from 90k a day to over 300,000, a volume alone representing 9 million more reads per month.
But the dark cloud hanging over the right-wing blogosphere does have a silver lining. From the ashes of a potentially devastating Republican defeat in November could come the phoenix-like rise of the right-wing blogosphere.
Conservatism as an ideology, after all, is in large measure about being against things. And being pushed out of the White House, kept out of the Congressional majority and locked out of the Supreme Court will put the conservative movement back into its traditional - and deserved - role of the angry opposition. A landslide win by the Democrats this fall could be the best thing that ever happened to the right-wing rage machine online.
In the meantime, the liberal blogosphere will enjoy its current edge over its conservative counterparts. As the GOP and its allies worry and whine over how to innovate using the Internet, the Democratic Party and groups like the New Politics Institute will continue to engage the liberal blogosphere to foster new online approaches to build communities, communicate messages and raise money.
As for the right-wing bloggers, they have nothing to fear but winning itself.