There’s a thick vein of subversion in any good conservative journalist, and in M. Stanton Evans, who died last week, the vein ran wide and deep. Always, though, it was tempered by good humor, a sly appreciation for human absurdity, and an implacable love for his country and for what his friend Russell Kirk called “the permanent things.” He was one of a handful of men who could lay claim to being a founder of the conservative movement in the United States, and if the movement has lost some of his bounce and zing along the way, we can’t blame Stan.
The many tributes have showcased some of his best lines. “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate,” he said after Nixon’s resignation. The Falklands war, he said, posed a particular dilemma for conservatives: “On the one hand, we like imperialism. On the other, we favor military dictatorships.” On economic policy: “Tax cuts are like sex. When they’re good, they’re very, very good. And when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good.” And as for the great villain of American history, at least in liberal mythology: “I didn’t agree with what Joe McCarthy was trying to do, but I sure did admire his methods.”
Stan’s own method, as these excellent jokes demonstrate, was to take the liberal caricature of conservatives and turn it to his own advantage: The transparent absurdity of the caricature revealed more about the vanity and credulity of liberals than about conservative beliefs and attitudes. The move requires a great deal of self-assurance, and it was this confidence that was perhaps Stan’s greatest gift to his fellow conservatives in the early days. He showed that there’s never a need to be diffident in defending, as conservatives are supposed to do, the principles of economic and political freedom. He mounted his defense from a variety of perches: as an editor (at the Indianapolis News, Human Events, and National Review), as a columnist (syndicated widely for nearly 20 years), and as a freelance commentator (for CBS and NPR). His most lasting contribution may be as founder of the National Journalism Center, which has trained such well-known journalists as Ann Coulter, Greg Gutfeld, and Malcolm Gladwell.
The high spirits of Stan Evans’s public character carried over to his social and private life. He liked to smoke, and he liked to drink, and, as he would doubtless be pleased to point out, his vices finally caught up with him—at age 80. It was a nice run.
