Vance Shouldn’t Try To Be The Right’s Manager

It’s a tall task, and it doesn’t necessarily determine elections

Anti-DEI crusader Christopher Rufo wants JD Vance to serve as the Right’s manager.

Seeing the void left by Charlie Kirk, Rufo thinks the vice president should fill the TPUSA’s founder’s shoes and bring right-wingers together. He sees a model for this role in Richard Nixon.

“[W]e might recall the experience of another man who rose to the vice presidency early in life, dealt with the problems of racialism and conspiracism within the Right, and, through trial and error, learned how to manage a coalition, win the presidency, and win reelection in a 49-state landslide: Richard Nixon,” Rufo wrote in a column last week.

The conservative activist’s dream for Vance’s Nixonian turn is to “stake out popular positions, maintain strategic distance from unpopular figures, and bring together the Right’s legitimate factions” in order to secure election victories.

There are some issues with this argument. Richard Nixon is not the best model to emulate for someone to unite the Right. The right-wing sphere is much more resistant to the shepherding favored by Rufo. Additionaly, the people most desiring for gatekeeping want to ensure Vance is not the next GOP nominee and the Online Right is purged from conservatism.

There’s an understandable desire to channel the energy and enthusiasm of the Online Right into proper political channels. But it’s a task that probably not even JD Vance can do.

Nixon did win two presidential elections. His 1972 presidential victory was a landslide. But this wasn’t so much a result of building up a durable movement, but a result of cunning pragmatism, favorable circumstances, and terrible opponents. In 1968, Nixon tried hard to appeal to conservatives to lure them away from Ronald Reagan and George Wallace. Fashioning himself as an electable Wallace helped him win. By 1972, the conservative movement hated Nixon over his failure to roll back liberal domestic victories and his outreach to China. They even backed a quixotic primary challenger against Nixon. However, the 37th president primarily won a landslide victory due to his extremely weak opponent, George McGovern. What little movement Nixon had behind failed to support him during the the Watergate scandal and completely disappeared when Dick left the White House.

If Nixon is the model, then we’re saying we want a short-term movement that does nothing but win elections, fails to achieve right-wing goals, can’t rally sufficient support for the president, and vanishes after a White House term expires. Nixon was not the terrible president the Left portrays him as, but he’s not quite an example worth following.

Rufo likes Nixon because he kept out the John Birch Society and other unwanted types from his winning coalition. It was much easier to accomplish something like that in the past. The controlled media environment made it easier to suppress Bircher views. One did not have social media, and most listened to the establishment media. If the respectable papers and evening news said the Birchers were bad, then people accepted it without question.

This no longer works. The majority of Americans get at least some of their news from social media. This allows them to hear information and opinions they would’ve never heard before. It’s how Trump became president and how the establishment was discredited. Of course, it comes with downsides, such as idiotic AI slop, bonkers conspiracy theories, and foreign actors LARPing as heritage Americans. But this is how people now get their information, for better and for worse.

Conservatives, in particular, are dependent on this environment. The old media environment made it easier to suppress right-wing views and make a nothingburger like Watergate into the greatest threat our democracy ever experienced. Today, conservative views gain much more attention than ever before. The White House’s social media accounts broadcast right-wing memes and talking points to millions of people worldwide. Vance is arguably the most online of any admin official, and much of his political stature owes to his posting.

One can’t turn this off with a mere editorial. Nor should one want to. The online space influencing politics is, in part, how we got Trump in the first place. This phenomenon makes the Right better and more in tune with the youth.

There are plenty of people who share Rufo’s desire to establish “guardrails” for the Right, but not his wish for Vance to do it. As we’ve witnessed throughout the Right’s ongoing civil war, this group isn’t that fond of Vance. Ted Cruz is trying to build off the establishment’s hostility towards Tucker Carlson to displace Vance as the successor to Trump. Other Republicans and conservative commentators will follow his lead. This crowd’s goal is to wipe out the New Right elements that came to prominence with Trump’s ascent. They want things to return to the pre-Trump norm.

Rufo doesn’t share this. He’s influenced by the online sphere and has adopted some of their views. Last week, he argued with old guard conservatives about the dangers of Somalis, arguing that the group wasn’t fit for mass assimilation. This would not be a view tolerated by Con Inc. a decade ago.

But Rufo wants the New Right strictly managed and channeled towards electoral politics. This is a Herculean task. The online sphere isn’t built to do normal politics. People get on X to vent and indulge in escapism. Get out the vote efforts strikes these folks as boring. They’d rather post offensive memes and imagine themselves leading a fascist revolution. It’s the nature of the beast. The Online Right can be effectively used to pump out memes and propaganda for presidential elections, but it’s hard to turn it into a tool for other political efforts.

There’s a hope the Online Right can be the new conservative media and operate in a similar way. Conservative media would constantly lambast Republican politicians (as evinced by National Review turning on Nixon) but it always made sure to stay on Team Red and help out the GOP come election time. This had the downside of conservative media being single-mindedly focused on winning elections, which made these pundits ignore or dismiss other issues that interfered with that outlook. Elections are how you get anything done in our system, so it made sense for this to be the focus.

The Online Right doesn’t want to have that as its focus. Much of this sphere is content with believing a civil war/revolution/collapse will make elections meaningless and allow them to take total power. Many of the Online Right’s political aspirations are unpopular with the public, so they feel the democratic process is a waste of time. Better to dream of the inevitable collapse instead.

There’s no way to adequately corral the new forces of the Right. No politician can manage or lead it. Even Trump can’t do that. Censorship is out of the question as it would just help the Left regain control over the internet and Con Inc. to regain control over the Right. It’s best just to leave it be. It can be a useful tool at times for normal politics, but Republicans can’t rely on it.

Vance can win a general election without having to play the Right’s manager. Things will sort themselves out in the commentary sphere. If anything, Vance should be less online and more focused on things outside of right-wing feuding. The electorate votes on bread-and-butter issues, not on social media engagement.

The Online Right will continue to thrive in its anarchic state. It will still influence conservative politics, just not in a way many figures would wish. It’s both a gift, and a curse. But American politics would be worse without it.