Hail to Nat Hentoff

This weekend I did the heavy lifting for both Real Clear Books and Real Clear Religion, the latter so that RCR deputy Nick Hahn could celebrate his latest birthday in relative peace. When Mark Judge sent in a column celebrating the great critic Nat Hentoff of course I led with it.

Judge argues that Hentoff has fallen out of favor with liberals because he has gone over to the dark side and condemned abortion. There’s something to that, yet Hentoff has done many other things that enrage fellow progressives.

Most famously, the free speech activist Hentoff has campaigned against hate crimes laws. He argues that hate crimes are essentially thought crimes and has called out fellow civil libertarians for supporting laws that would chill speech.

Conservatives tend to like and respect the man not because he agrees with them on so many issues but because he is neither a snob nor a tribalist. Hentoff never hesitates to criticize liberals for abandoning their principles for partisan reasons and he’s willing to speak well of people who are are not normally spoken well of by those on the left. The liberal Jewish atheist went so far as to write a sympathetic biography of John Cardinal O’Connor.

Nat Hentoff is very far from perfect but America would be a lot better off if it had more liberals, and more conservatives for that matter, like him.