Stan Evans & the conservative experience
M. Stanton Evans, one of the founders of the modern conservative movement, died Tuesday last at the age of 80. But one has to wonder how many of today's conservatives fully appreciate his contributions to conservatism or, worse, fully understand the precepts he promoted.
At the ripe old age of 26, Mr. Evans was the primary author of The Sharon Statement, a wonderfully succinct affidavit of guiding conservative principles for members of Young Americans for Freedom. What began as a statement about the “responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths” became an outline for all conservatives. It was titled for where its influences were fostered, in William F. Buckley Jr.'s Sharon, Conn., home.
Today's conservatives — the real and faux deals, young and old alike — could learn much by reviewing The Sharon Statement or, better yet, reading it for the first time.
“(L)iberty is indivisible” and “political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom,” Evans wrote nearly 55 years ago. It wasn't so much an original thought as it was a necessary restatement of the obvious.
But too many contemporary “conservatives” use politics as a power play in an attempt, through interventionism, to command economic freedom, which leads only to economic handcuffs.
“(T)he purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice,” Evans added. “(W)hen government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates power, which tends to diminish order and liberty.”
But too many of today's “conservatives” traduce liberty and disrupt internal order by promoting crony capitalism, fighting to preserve the Eisenhower-warned Military-Industrial Complex and, too often, view “justice” only through a reality-warping prism.
Evans wrote that the Constitution “is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power.”
Yet how many times have you heard a “conservative” speak of using (abusing?) government to “empower the people” who, as Evans also notes, already have God-given free will, derived from their “right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force”?
It is “the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand” that “is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs,” Evans noted.
Yet too many “conservatives” assiduously work to pervert the market economy. Think of everything from massive subsidies to well-heeled corporate cartels to so-called “anti-gouging” measures that only serve to promote inefficient allocation of resources (if not outright shortages of those resources) during periods of recovery from natural disasters.
Indeed, as Russell Kirk wrote in “The Conservative Mind” (1953), “Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from (Edmund) Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the times.”
Stan Evans knew that was possible without eschewing the basic principles of conservatism. Tragically, too many of today's self-professed “conservatives” don't.
Colin McNickle is Trib Total Media's director of editorial pages (412-320-7836 or cmcnickle@tribweb.com).
