The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 26, 2001 | by Liz Trotta

Heather Mac Donald has earned applause from the right and opprobrium from the left for her trenchant essays exploring `the real-world consequences of elite intellectual fads.'

One of Heather Mac Donald's more memorable Christmases occurred at her home in Los Angeles during the 1960s when her brother, a budding revolutionary at the University of California at Berkeley, brought home Chairman Mao posters as family gifts.

"It was the classic idiotic rebellion," she says ruefully. "I was, by default, a liberal because in this culture, if you're not affirmatively conservative, you're a liberal without thought."

Mac Donald, 44, has become one of the most potent voices for conservative intellectual thought in the country, commenting on everything from the Rev. Al Sharpton to welfare cheats. Her new book, The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society (Ivan R. Dee, $26, 242 pp), has caught the attention of urban planners, academics and politicians.

Mac Donald is not a member of the leggy blonde brigade that serves up volumes of verbiage on TV talk shows. A tall, dark-haired woman who wears no makeup, she appears occasionally on television but more often writes unseen, working at her desk in her apartment on New York City's Upper East Side. In conversation, she has the wide-eyed look of someone perpetually amazed by what she considers the philosophical lunacy of contemporary culture. "I wasn't a movement conservative," she says, "but then I sat down to write about welfare, talked to people and saw how it had totally destroyed their lives."

When she began her studies in linguistics and comparative literature at Yale University in the 1970s, theories on race, gender and diversity were already in full sway, most of which taught that truth is illusive at best. "Text" is all that matters, went the mantra; the search for facts is a futile exercise.

Mac Donald graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 1978. Two years later, by the time she had earned her master's degree in English on a Mellon fellowship at Cambridge University, the transition from language to identity politics was complete. "I finally realized that my whole college education had been a waste," she recalls. "Now you have literature professors bragging they never read books. People write law-review articles about the stiffness of their hair. It's all, `Let's beat up on the whites because they enslaved people of color.'"

She briefly returned to Yale in 1980 for graduate work, only to be repelled by the growing radical feminism and race-baiting there. Instead, she enrolled in at Stanford University's law school, where she wrote for the review and studied with former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. She also encountered courses such as critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence that defined reason as a tool of male oppression.

After clerking for a federal judge in Los Angeles, Mac Donald worked as a lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington and began to publish articles in the New Criterion, a conservative magazine. Eventually she returned to New York City, where she now is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Mac Donald is known for her cold eye and intellectual rigor in her attacks on American institutions, including the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the Smithsonian Institution and the New York Times. New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's administration in particular has relied on her harsh assessments of liberal policy. In an article titled "How to Train Cops," a response to attacks on the New York Police Department (NYPD) in the wake of the Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo scandals, the prickly conservative skewered the diversity trainers brought into the police academy to teach cops "cultural competence." There, recruits are obliged to spend hours talking about "oppression."

Confronting one instructor, Mac Donald asked if black racism is discussed in class. "Of course there is no such thing as black racism, she replies, flabbergasted at my ignorance," Mac Donald later wrote. "Racism is power and prejudice, so blacks by definition can't be racist.... Tell that to Korean and Jewish store owners, Chinese deliverymen and Mexicans working in fast-food restaurants in Harlem."

Former Democratic mayor Ed Koch scorns her reasoning. "I don't know if you can compare too much sensitivity with too many shots at an innocent person," he says, referring to the Diallo affair. But one of Giuliani's top guns, Deputy Mayor Joe Lhota, believes that Mac Donald is an extraordinary thinker who writes about individual freedom as though she lived in the era of Robespierre. "Even though she lives and works in an academic environment, she understands the practical side of government," he says. "She has core principles, namely that government should steer you in the right direction, but not row for you."