Continuing the beneficial meltdown of the mainstream media, including bastions of the erstwhile counterculture (which long ago became the mainstream culture), Village Voice magazine has laid off three editors, including longtime columnist/editor Nat Hentoff.

Hentoff, who wrote about jazz and then civil liberties for the newspaper for the past fifty years, was a staunch leftist and counterculturalist, but he showed some intellectual integrity on the subject of freedom of speech in recent years, exemplified by his book Free Speech for Me—But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.

The premise of the book is rather skewed, given that the right has virtually no power in either academia or the culture, especially the elite culture. Nevertheless, the fact that a well-known leftist and ACLU-style civil liberties advocate (meaning those who use the subject as a stalking horse for the left’s agenda) would acknowledge the left’s illiberalism was an important cultural event.

The decline and perhaps eventual fall of the Village Voice will be equally salubrious.

Update (1/15/09 11:30 a.m.): As Joe notes in the comment section below, another policy position that made Hentoff unusual—and unwanted—among the left was his opposition to legalized abortion. It was indeed a very courageous stand for a man of the left to take.

Hentoff is to be commended for acknowledging that his dedication to protecting people from exploitation by government and big business meant also protecting unborn children from the abortion industry. That industry constitutes an alliance between business and state that exploits women’s desperation, especially through decades of destruction of the humane alternative, adoption.

The huge, extremely profitable, and unregulated abortion industry is one of those rare businesses that the left supports, in one of the great, perverse ironies of our time.

Thanks, Joe, for reminding us of this important aspect of Hentoff’s life’s work.

—S. T. Karnick

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