RIP Nat Hentoff
8th January 2017
Hentoff was less likely to be called a liberal later in life. That’s partly because his brand of free-speech absolutism was growing less common on the left, and it’s partly because of his heterodoxy on abortion. (Hentoff was pro-life, arguing against abortion on the same grounds that he argued against capital punishment and war. Or, at least, against some wars—he eventually rended his seamless garment to support interventions in Rwanda and Iraq.) But you couldn’t really cast him as a man of the right either: Besides his intense distrust for the police agencies that conservatives tend to revere, he was a longtime democratic socialist who held onto a lot of his leftist economic ideas in old age. It’s not even quite right to call him an ACLU liberal, because he kept butting heads with the ACLU. (The nation’s most prominent civil libertarian organization wasn’t always civil libertarian enough for him.) Best to think of him as his own man, with at least a couple of views to offend pretty much anyone.