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Freshly resupplied with Laphraoig and Glen Livet, Lucretia assumes hosting duties this week to examine—and cross-examine—Steve about his new biography M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom, which comes out officially on Monday.
Lucretia walks Steve through how he came to know Evans (41 years ago now!), and why he think Evans is "the perfect conservative," both in theoretical and practical terms.
In addition to his legacy as a tutor for a generation of young journalists and writers whose ranks include Ann Coulter, Greg Gutfeld, John Fund (and Steve!), Evans was instrumental in several key turning points in the conservative movement in the 1960s and 1970s (such as providing desperate life support to Reagan's faltering campaign in 1976), as well as writing The Sharon Statement, the founding document of Young Americans for Freedom.
As a thinker, Evans was early on to the problem we today call the "administrative state," as well as critiquing in counter-intuitive ways the flabby anti-Communism of establishment liberalism. His mode of inquiry is very useful to circumstances today.
Worth listening all the way to the very end, where we have included a short clip of Stan telling "con law jokes" (no kidding), set to the backdrop of his favorite Elvis tune, "Suspicious Minds."
Steve Hayward
"Lucretia"
Discussion (7)
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So it took me two secs to find the National Review review of Blacklisted by History—what a great title, BTW; makes me wonder if it was Evans’s alone. You guys must know how annoying it is to kiss and not tell!
Great podcast! Lucretia will no doubt sell a lot of books. She’s very good at eliciting nuance and context. As a former reporter/feature writer myself, I wonder if the curt, crisp style of newsroom writing plays a part in some of Lucretia’s observations. (In my experience—we’re talking the early 1980–headline writers were by far the most creative writers on staff; well, them and the guys in sports.)
The contemporary problem of trying to inculcate morality through the law, it seems to me (and, yes, I have a friendly dog in this fight), involves the word itself. Lucretia uses it in its formalist, eighteenth-century sense, no? Meaning a filter focused on principles and underlying societal goals. But what the vast majority hear in that word today (not without some merit) is a specified sexual morality—however good in itself—to be imposed by the state, that is, for lack of a better word, the law. I see a glitch. The robber who robs someone else clearly hurts that other person. The robber who has consensual sexual relations with someone else which the law/social convention asserts they should not be having is not clearly causing harm to anyone, but were that the case—through rape, robbery, and the like—the other person would already have the right to pursue punishment/compensation through the justice system. (BTW, I totally agree with Conrad Black’s and Mark Steyn’s condemnation of American justice.)
I’m definitely going to get the new book, unless there’s going to be an audiobook as well. Great fun listening to you guys.
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Wow, that is really powerful. I want to emphasize, though, that I’m talking about the public realm. The private realm is free to take a more particularized approach to morality, which is fine with me. For example, the church. Speaking of which, I think that to the extent we’ve lost the ability to share an understanding of basic rights and wrongs, as reflected in our ongoing conflicts in the public realm, it’s a failing of the church, and for that failing, the state has no good answer.
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Thanks Mr. Hayward.
This is great fun:
It shows the humor that Mr. Hayward talks about.
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