Despite their hostility to most of what has happened in the humanities the past half-century, American conservative intellectuals like to think themselves as the true defenders of the humanistic tradition. Within academia, they have often focused on defending notions of reason and objectivity against the “relativism” and “irrationalism” supposedly introduced into the humanities by modern German and French philosophy. Outside the university, their critiques have pursued narrower political goals, attacking disciplines like English and Comparative Literature as bastions of political correctness and anti-Americanism.

Much as conservative intellectuals long ago stopped confronting any vestige of actual Marxism, it is difficult to find within the diatribes of the movement’s humanities police any awareness of the university as it currently exists, of the humanistic disciplines as they have evolved in the past several decades, or of what truly threatens their long-term survival. The conservative humanities critique, like its Marxism critique, has been reduced to a meme that ripples through an airless, dimly-lit blogosphere, never encountering any light of intellectual engagement.

Occasionally, it breaks through into one of the publications that give conservative intellectuals their veneer of credibility, as in the case of conservative author Heather Mac Donald’s piece in the latest issue of City Journal, recently repurposed as an op-ed in — where else? — the Wall Street Journal.