Stan Evans and the Rules of Political Combat, Part II

The great M. Stanton “Stan” Evans (1934-2015) was a master political journalist, theorist, and strategist. Last week in this column, we took a look at the first three of his Rules of Political Combat. Those were: 1) “Politics Abhors a Vacuum”; 2) “Write the Resolved Clause”; and 3) “Nothing is ‘Inevitable.’” The first two concerned taking the initiative on political issues and defining what are the real problems in politics that must be solved or ameliorated. The third had to do with not giving in to the leftist trick of saying that resistance to their wills is impossible because of fate, “the arc of history,” or some other cosmic-sounding phrase that is used to describe What We Libs Want. These first three rules are so important because in life, as the saying goes, 90% of success is showing up. For Evans, this is the starting point of any effective political strategy. The other 10% might be summarized as sticking in there and doing it right. That’s what we see in his next rules.

Rule 4: “Fighting is better than not fighting.” Not buying into the “inevitable” defeat that is being broadcast to us by the political/media/tech/educational machine gives us the freedom to fight back. While Evans didn’t think that you could take on every single battle—and certainly not all of them at the same time—he did believe that with good research and an understanding of the tactics needed, conservatives could overwhelm that big information/disinformation machine wielded by the left and could secure victories.

It’s important to clarify here. Too often, what counts as “fighting” for Republican politicians is simply the proverbial “strongly worded letter” or, today, the righteously angry tweet. But by remembering Evans’s earlier rules, conservatives can understand what fighting really is: defining the issues and taking the initiative on legislative and policy decisions. Fighting is action that moves the political ball further up the field, forcing the left to play defense.

Of course, one might retort that the GOP doesn’t even have the Senate or the Presidency right now, which means that passing legislation will often be impossible or unwise. Evans famously quipped that America had only two parties, the stupid party and the evil party: “Occasionally, the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid. That’s called bipartisanship.”

Conservatives have to get over the fear of being attacked for gumming up the works in our dysfunctional system. Sometimes fighting has to take the form of blocking the evil party’s actions. Right now, figuring out how to gum up the partisan DOJ and the administrative state through the power of the purse ought to be first in Republican congressional minds. As well as a whole lot more. As Evans also said, “Gridlock is the next best thing to having a constitution.”  

Rule 5: “Washington is not America.” In fighting for some good thing or against some supposedly inevitable thing, those in the federal government often are threatened with the claim that “the people” won’t stand for something—and often, the longer people are in office, the more cowed they will be by their political opponents’ appeal to supposedly overwhelming popular disapproval. While many Republicans came to Washington repeating Rule 5 over and over, Evans noted, they soon forget it. One of Evans’s most famous one-liners, a question, was, “Why is it that when one of us gets into a position of power in Washington, he’s no longer one of us?”

The problem with breathing the fumes of the Swamp is that it is too easy to get used to them. It is all too easy for those living there to start to take on the assumptions that govern the place and forget to check what their actual constituents believe. Worse, many of them can become adept at a kind of split personality: they will condemn what’s happening in Washington when they, all too infrequently, go home and take part in it when they get back. Thankfully, today that’s much harder to pull off, as Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney found out.

If conservative politicians want to remain “one of us,” they have to keep in contact with us and know what we, their base of support, actually think.

Rule 6: “Taxes are trumps.” Many on the new right have come to be a little skeptical of the emphasis on tax cuts. This may have something to do with the GOP’s ability to go beyond the tax cut. In 2017-2018, many of us were horrified that despite GOP control of the House, Senate, and Presidency, the only significant legislation that got passed was a tax bill. It was an embarrassing and disheartening spectacle in which Donald Trump revealed how many of the supposed conservatives were motivated much more by hostility to him than getting things done.

But cutting taxes is still a good idea. Evans called it “a solid, powerful, and intelligible topic that can be placed against all the standard liberal promises of something-for-nothing from the federal larder.” It is particularly powerful and intelligible under the Biden economy. American families are suffering the effects of inflation—particularly on items such as food that are not even a part of the calculation of inflation. Championing tax cuts that will help out families in this situation is especially important for politicians on the state level. CPAC recently wrote a letter to members of North Carolina’s General Assembly, urging them to pass tax cuts precisely for this reason—and not to get too tangled up in the demands of lobbyists who are holding up tax cuts until they get what they want.

Tax cuts alone are not enough, to be sure. What ought to accompany those tax cuts are cuts to spending on the part of government at all levels—there is no end to the useless and destructive spending right now of the public’s money. But tax cuts should still be, as Evans says, “the gold standard in Republican issues.”

Evans’s six rules have, I believe, passed the test of time. They are all about the will to fight, the proper strategy, and the most important tactics. They are principles that require prudence to apply, but that’s not a problem. Any political rules will have to be flexible enough that the good statesman can act wisely in a variety of circumstances. These six, though written twenty-five years ago, still serve as a powerful basis for action. Conservative politicians ignore them at their own—and our!—peril.

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.