Differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties

I've been wanting to discuss this for quite a while now. I'm finally getting around to it. I have to preface this by saying that I'm going to relate party politics to blogs, and you're going to have to hear me out. Danny about called me stupid the other night, but by the time I was done with my argument, he understood. So read on.

Okay, so if we look at the top liberal and conservative blogs we find major differences. The top liberal blogs (dailykos, etc) are community based sites. Readers can not only read posts but they can put comments and even post their own diaries. Discussion is encouraged and ideas are exchanged.
Now looking at the top conservative blogs (powerline, etc) we see that no discussion is allowed. Most of them don't even let you comment. You read, you agree, that's it. No differing opinion, no discussion.

So this brings me to the parties. The Democratic party is dependent on the people. It has been very reliant in the past few years on grass roots efforts. Democrats are more critical of their leaders. They hold them accountable for every decision they make. There is almost as much negativity about democrats on the daily kos as there is about republicans. We want people who will represent us and what we stand for. This is why democrats are more likely to go over to third parties such as the green party.
The republican party is the party of big business. But more than that, they tell you what to believe. It's a top down system. The top says what you should think, and then the talking heads are disbursed to convince you why you should think that. The republican party is part of a huge machine that tells you what to think. Republicans aren't held accountable for their decisions. Conservatives more often stick to that one important issue and ignore every other decision their representative makes.

So this brings me to how do the democrats win. How do you beat the machine without building a machine yourself? I don't ever want there to actually be a vast left wing conspiracy, but I want to win. In my opinion, though, if we win by building a machine, we've actually lost. So what to do. I just don't know.