THE RACK: the story behind one VOICWAR design, with sources. The newsletter, TEETH, arrives every other week. Subscribe.
A Republican president made this phrase famous. Then he took it back. It kept going anyway.
"Evil empire" did not come from a protest sign. It came from a podium, and its own author stopped believing it.
1982. Speechwriter Anthony Dolan tries the language in a Reagan speech to the British House of Commons. Other advisers cut it before he speaks.
March 8, 1983. Dolan gets it through. Reagan is in Orlando, speaking to a convention of evangelical Christians. He calls the Soviet Union "the focus of evil in the modern world." He warns against treating both superpowers as equally to blame.
Immediately. Critics call it reckless. The Christian Science Monitor argues the language will speed up the arms race. TASS, the Soviet news agency, calls it "bellicose, lunatic anti-communism."
1988, Moscow. Asked whether he still considers the Soviet Union an evil empire, Reagan says no. That was "another time, another era."
So the man who put the phrase into the language walked it back five years later, on the record, standing in the capital of the empire in question.
The phrase did not care. It had already left him.
That is the thing about naming a power as evil in front of a crowd. You do not get to decide who picks it up next, or where they point it. Language does not stay loyal to the podium it came from.
It is still in use. Only the target moved.
Wear it back at them.