The Last Real Liberal

Nat Hentoff passed away over the weekend.  He was 91.  

After getting his start as a jazz critic with the Village Voice, Hentoff swerved into a career as a civil liberties activist.  Probably 25 years ago, I read Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee – a book about free speech, but even moreso a treatise on how protecting freedom for the unpopular and unsavory was as important, or more important, than protecting it for “the good guys”.  It also warned of today’s campus totalitarianism.  Hentoff, a longtime ACLU activist, lived out what the organization was back before it turned into the “Manhattan Civil Liberties Union.

It’s become a traffic-worn cliche to say an old-time conservative, a Ronald Reagan or a Jack Kemp, “..couldn’t get elected in today’s GOP” – but it’s actually true that Nat Hentoff couldn’t get arrested in today’s power-mad hard left.  We know this because today’s left literally did, in fact, reject him:

In 2009, after 50 years, Hentoff lost his job at the Village Voice. He was told it was due to “budget” concerns, but most believe he had been fired because his libertarianism was increasingly controversial on the left. In the years that followed, he wrote for numerous publications, including The Washington Times, and worked with the Cato Institute. He was honored by and spoke on free speech and privacy at a Conservative Political Action Conference and served on the advisory board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which fights for free speech on our campuses.
When the Village Voice cast him adrift, he observed that he would just have to put on his “skunk suit” and saunter off to someone else’s “garden party.” And he did just that. He supported the Iraq war, but was a dogged critic of the Bush administration’s assault on privacy rights in the name of the “War on Terror.” He said he was going to support Barack Obama in 2008, but couldn’t because of the man’s views on partial-birth abortion. Last year he was to be found in the camp of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. He had not become a conservative, but remained Nat Hentoff. He was a man who could get up in the morning, look himself in the mirror and see the face of one who had, regardless of what others might say, remained true to his convictions.

He may have been the last liberal who actually was a liberal.

16 thoughts on “The Last Real Liberal

  1. Dennis Prager makes that point regularly. There are no more liberals, they are all leftists now.

    Liberals can be honest, and you can discuss things with a Liberal. Leftists you just have to defeat.

  2. Nah, there are plenty of real liberals still around.

    I am less sure you are correct about old Nat, but I do remember him from back in the day.

    The ACLU is still defending unpopular speech. Interestingly, an old movie recently, with stars like Danby Kaye playing a Jewish resident from Skokie, and portraying the ACLUs fight to defend unpopular free speech including neo-nazis rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in their desire to harass the Jews, including Holocaust survivors with that march.

    The ACLU continues to be supported by the left, including free speech for unpopular causes. And the neo-nazis and white supremacists have been more broadly welcomed into the mainstream conservative right. Like Steve Bannon.

    Meanwhile you conservatives continue to attack free speech, including attempting to legalize running down protesters with your vehicles.

    This strikes me as hypocritical given that those Nazis, unpopular free speech, if there ever was such a thing, was a planned march on popular well traveled roadways.

    Much as conservatives obstructed freedom marchers on the Edmund Pettis bridge.

    The idea that liberals no longer support protection of unpopular speech is another example of conservatives hypocritically believing things which are factually false about liberals while engaging in the very behavior they condemn.

  3. Before I forget, in response to an old conversation about male human beings w/o a Y chromosome, the example I had in mind at the time but couldn’t locate while engaged in other multitasking, was de la Chapelke Syndrome which results in a double X complement of chromosomes – genetically female (sort of) with testicles and penis, no Y chromosome.

    There are more wonky sources, but wikipedia isn’t bad with their entry.

    There are of course other conditions with similar transgender situations.

    Back to unpopular opinions, of course the 1A is about government obstruction of speech and assembly, not organizations like the Republican National Convention running material from Storm front and VDare on their wrap around screen.

    Was that your idea of the GOP defending free speech? Because those groups are unpopular, sure, but not being the government, it sure looks like more right wing fascism being embraced.

  4. So Cuomo’s offer of free college for middle class kids in New York has Castro-style strings attached.
    If you leave the state after you graduate, your free tuition becomes a loan you have to repay.
    This is the excuse the Cubans use to stop people from leaving their shithole of a country: the state payed for your education, you owe them. It’s also the justification the East Germans used when they shot people trying to escape to the West.

  5. Mitch, can you continue your DG blockage?
    She is a nut case and an obsessive hater.

  6. DG, those were Democrats on the Edmund Pettis Bridge.
    and whinging about free speech is rich coming from someone who will NOT tolerate anyone posting a dissenting view on her own site

  7. Meanwhile you conservatives continue to attack free speech, including attempting to legalize running down protesters with your vehicles.

    Huh. I don’t think that was in the bill. Or is that something you’ve fact-checked? Maybe you can cite the legislative language supporting that assertion?

  8. DG,

    I approved your comments, against my much-better judgment, for two reasons:

    1) To show newcomers to this comment section what I have to deal with

    2) To respond to your very-long-delayed response to a question I asked you probably close to two years ago:

    Before I forget, in response to an old conversation about male human beings w/o a Y chromosome, the example I had in mind at the time but couldn’t locate while engaged in other multitasking, was de la Chapelke Syndrome which results in a double X complement of chromosomes – genetically female (sort of) with testicles and penis, no Y chromosome.

    That’s very interesting.

    But what you said was that transgender surgery altered the chromosomes, making the sex change at a genetic level.

    Shall I go back and find the original?

    We weren’t talking about exceedingly rare genetic and chromosomal disorders. We were talking about reassignment surgery.

  9. Mitch, can you continue your DG blockage?

    Since she’s shown no signs of knowing, much less meeting, my requests? Yes. Blockage is back in effect.

  10. Worth noting; there is no credible evidence that Steve Bannon is a racist of any type. There is, however, credible evidence that former (thanks be to God) President Obama allowed a racist voting scheme to continue in Guam, and there is credible evidence of anti-Semitic attitudes on the part of Democrats like Keith Ellison, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton.

  11. But what you said was that transgender surgery altered the chromosomes, making the sex change at a genetic level.
    MBerg, that is old think.
    New think is that biological sex is a social construct: https://www.autostraddle.com/its-time-for-people-to-stop-using-the-social-construct-of-biological-sex-to-defend-their-transmisogyny-240284/
    Sure, laugh. I am serious. This is coming. The purpose is to deny any “scientific” basis for distinguishing between the sexes.

  12. And also campus speech codes are ENTIRELY the product of the leftist monopoly of academia.

    The left is completely anti-freedom, with one exception. The freedom to murder unborn children to alleviate inconvenience.

    Speech codes? leftist.
    Campaign Finance Reform/limits? leftist.
    Gun control? leftist.

    The left wants to limit or eliminate your choice of tobacco (but not other drugs nor alcohol), food (vegans, salt, fat bans, large quantities of soda), automobiles, outdoor recreation, how much money you can earn and keep, etc.

    The environmental movement wants to plunge our society back into the 1800s as far as quality of life is concerned by limiting power production and consumption.

    The Malthusians just want to eliminate mankind entirely.

    If he’s wrong about everything else, Michael Savage is correct on one point: Liberalism is a mental disorder.

  13. I am going to pray that DogGone can finally find the honesty that Nat Hentoff had–and that she finds the God Hentoff apparently never found, too.

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