COLUMNIST WHO TOOK AIM AT LIBERAL PIETIES

John Leo, who as a columnist for Time and U.S. News & World Report used his acerbic wit to slaughter herds of liberal sacred cows, especially those wandering outward from college campuses, died on Monday in New York City. He was 86.

His daughter Alex Leo said that the cause of his death, at a hospice, had not been determined, but that he had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease and had recently been hospitalized for COVID-19.

John Leo was often labeled a libertarian and a conservative, but he insisted he was neither — though they were not inapt terms for the often scornful tone he took toward left-wing pieties like affirmative action and campus speech codes.

He saw himself as a social skeptic, in the mode of his literary heroes Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken and A.J. Liebling. Like them, he viewed American life with a gimlet eye, leavened by a disarming sense of humor and a deep reserve of cultural and historical knowledge.

“In many ways he was an old-fashioned Democrat,” said writer Roger Rosenblatt, a close friend. “He was anything but a right-wing nut case.”

Also like his heroes, and unlike many of today’s politically inclined columnists, Leo saw himself less as a warrior out to crush ideological enemies than as a thoughtful interlocutor, pushing readers toward enlightenment.

“People are hungry for strong analysis to rub up against,” he told Christianity Today magazine in 1996. “They may not agree with me, but they believe I mean what I say. If I say it strongly, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, that’s right’ or ‘I think he’s full of beans and I’m going to explain why.’ Either way it makes people think.”

But his stance was not merely critical. He fashioned himself a moralist, defending what he saw as an endangered American sense of community that was under attack by liberal individualism and capitalism.

“The culture has careened away from communal feeling to a view that we’re each just 250 million atoms bouncing around looking for advantage,” he said.

As a columnist for U.S. News & World Report in the late 1980s and ’90s, Leo played a lead role in the era’s roiling culture wars, which were marked by contentious debates about race, gender and inequality that can seem remarkably similar to today’s battles over the same issues.

He was not a reactionary — for example, he supported gay rights. He preferred to take aim at excess, especially in college humanities departments, where dismantling the Western canon and the proliferation of “studies” programs — disabilities studies, cultural studies — struck him as absurd and dangerous.

With one eye on campus, he kept the other on popular culture and what he saw as its debasement in the service of corporate greed. Along with other conservatives, he called out Time Warner in the mid-1990s for its ownership of Interscope Records, a major producer of gangsta rap. Largely as a result of their pressure, Time Warner sold its stake in Interscope in 1995.