Stan Evans and the Rules of Political Combat, Part I

The late M. Stanton “Stan” Evans (1934-2015) was a legendary journalist, writer, teacher, and conservative political strategist and sometime theorist. He was the author of the famous Sharon Statement of conservative principles, one of the geniuses behind CPAC, and one of the forces helping to bring about the Reagan revolution. Eight years after his death, he is not nearly as well known as he should be, though Steven F. Hayward’s 2022 M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom provides a rollicking but substantive account of his life and thought for those who want to know more.  

Hayward’s subtitle indicates correctly that his book doesn’t skimp on the hilarious stories of this serious thinker with blue collar tastes, a free populist spirit, and a talent for laugh-out-loud zingers that either punctured falsehood or bore truths. Hayward not only quotes many of these zingers in the main text but also includes in his first appendix a four-page collection of them for the reader. While it will no doubt prove impossible to resist the temptation to quote some of them, this column will focus instead on the first half of Evans’s Six Rules for Political Combat, reprinted in Hayward’s second appendix. Though he formulated these rules in the late 1990s, a quarter of a century later they remain a pretty good thumbnail guide to conservative action. Next week’s column will examine the second half.

The rules were formulated to respond to the “left’s standard drill,” which he thought could be most easily seen on environmental and safety questions:

“The routine is always just the same: Build up alarm about some asserted menace to public health or Mother Nature; cite ‘studies’ or “science’ of some sort the average person can’t find or fathom; bring forth a crew of activists/politicians/official spokesmen who hammer on these alleged data—all repeated at endless length in hearings, meetings and media forums. Finally, when the public has had its ‘consciousness raised’ enough (i.e., is scared out of its wits) move to adopt the desired big spending-taxing-regulating measure.”

Oh, if Evans could have only seen 2020 and the uses of a “public health” threat to close churches, schools, and businesses—though not the big corporations and the liquor stores! Or even this summer as we have been subject to endless propaganda about the supposedly hottest summer in 120 thousand years! Time to ban gas stoves and limit cars and create “fifteen-minute cities” in which the populace will be told how far they can drive.

The drill is the same. The ends to which it is being used are becoming more and more dire.

So what should conservatives do? According to Evans, the difficulty is that conservatives have too often taken it upon themselves to “play goalie” when they should “go on the offensive.” These are rules for combat, after all.

Rule 1: “Politics abhors a vacuum.” What Evans means is that when conservatives simply play defense, this leaves the ball in the hands of liberals and the left. And the left is not shy about making an end run around or even right up the middle when they know they get to keep the ball. What Evans wants is for conservatives to take the ball themselves and make the liberal left play defense.

This is rule number one because it is the most important. Failing to seize the initiative by advancing your position is the quickest way to lose. With all due respect to William F. Buckley, Jr., (with whom Evans worked for thirteen years on the staff of National Review), the task of the conservative cannot end at standing athwart history and yelling stop. It must be standing athwart history—or at least the ideological view of history as advancing in a leftward and secular direction— and pushing back on it hard. Failing to do so leads to the common phenomenon of conservatives who end up making “the conservative case for” all sorts of unconservative ideas. As Evans himself lamented, “Why is it that when one of us gets into a position of power in Washington, he’s no longer one of us?”    

Rule 2: “Write the resolved clause.”  Because they’re playing defense, conservatives too often end up simply arguing within the constraints of a situation and language defined by the left. Instead of framing what is and is not a problem, Evans exhorts, conservatives “must avoid the trap of simply debating issues as the left presents them and instead define the issue for themselves.” When the right has won lately, it is because it has done precisely that. States where the GOP has refused to accept the terms of debate are where it has succeeded. We don’t need to accept the jerry-rigged jargon of diversity, equity, or inclusion. We can say those are bad terms whose definitions have been set by the left—and they are terrible definitions. Similarly, we don’t need to accept the terms of catastrophic climate change predictions nor the draconian policies proposed by

Democrats supposedly to address them.

Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute is famous for talking about how he has put together all the destructive elements of modern racialism and connected them to critical race theory as a term and a school of thought. For doing so, many on the left accuse him of being dishonest. This response is telling. The debate really is about fundamental disagreements about assumptions and claims already implicit in the choice of language and descriptions of problems and policies. Rufo is explaining the theoretical roots of Democrats’ policies. He is setting the terms of the debate and refusing to accept the language and, by extension, the assumptions of his opponents. Every conservative needs to think as he does.  

Rule 3: “Nothing is ‘inevitable.’” Evans calls this term “one of the hoariest verbal-conceptual tricks in the liberal handbook.” Here, the term “inevitable” simply means “something leftward activists or Beltway pundits assume or want,” the use of which is for “encouraging their cadres while demoralizing their opponents.”

In the age of Joe Biden, there are some really bad things happening. That is certain. Evans himself promulgated the Law of Inadequate Paranoia, which he defined, perhaps ironically, using the word in question: “No matter how bad you think things are, if you look closer you’ll inevitably find it’s worse.” But no matter how bad things really are, there is no such thing as a permanently lost cause because there are no permanently won battles. Goldwater’s stinging defeat in 1964 was not the end of the modern conservative movement’s political success in the Republican party and the nation, but instead its beginning. People on the right can indeed “change the dynamics of most political situations (and have done so),” Evans insisted. They can do so and have done so “by their own exertions and advocacy.”

For Evans, it was staying in the political combat that was half the battle. He would no doubt agree with Winston Churchill’s observation that if one is going through hell, the answer is to “keep going.” Evans’ Six Rules for Political Combat can help conservatives do just that—and perhaps even achieve victories.    

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. His Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, co-edited with Jessica Hooten Wilson, is now available in paperback from Notre Dame Press.