John Leo, Columnist Who Took Aim at Liberal Pieties, Dies at 86

As a columnist for U.S. Information & World Report within the late Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, Mr. Leo performed a lead position within the period’s roiling tradition wars, which have been marked by contentious debates about race, gender and inequality that may appear remarkably just like at the moment’s battles over the identical points.

He was not a reactionary — for instance, he supported homosexual rights at a time when many conservatives nonetheless trafficked in open homophobia. He most popular to take goal at extra, particularly in faculty humanities departments, the place dismantling the Western canon and the proliferation of “research” packages — disabilities research, cultural research — struck him as absurd and harmful.

With one eye on campus, he stored the opposite on widespread tradition and what he noticed as its debasement within the service of company greed. Together with different conservatives, like the previous secretary of training William J. Bennett, he referred to as out Time Warner within the mid-Nineteen Nineties for its possession of Interscope Data, a serious producer of gangsta rap. Largely on account of their strain, Time Warner offered its stake in Interscope in 1995.

However not like a few of his fellow combatants, Mr. Leo was too humorous a author to return off as a whole bluenose. He poked enjoyable at himself, and he wore his erudition flippantly. He insisted that his favourite painter was Sherwin Williams. He titled his first ebook, revealed in 1989, “How the Russians Invented Baseball and Different Essays of Enlightenment.”

“Leo is humorous in the way in which that Frank McCourt, the actor-writer, is humorous,” the journalist Dennis Duggan wrote in 1990 in Newsday. “When they’re on, which is nearly at all times, you may as properly prop your chin in your elbow and revel in, as a result of no matter you say goes to play like chocolate sauce on pasta.”

John Patrick Leo was born in Hoboken, N.J., on June 16, 1935 — Bloomsday, he was keen on noting — and grew up in close by Teaneck. His father, Maurice Leo, designed kitchen and hospital tools, and his mom, Mary (Trincellita) Leo, was a homemaker.