The Burden of Bad Ideas

How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society by Heather MacDonald

Over two decades have passed since Heather MacDonald first published her collection of essays from City Journal in book form as The Burden of Bad Ideas.

Yet somehow, her concerns in 2000 still seem unresolved today. For the bad ideas which worried MacDonald at the turn of the millennium are currently center-stage—except more so.

Which makes me think the problem may not be so much with intellectuals themselves, as those who write checks for bad ideas.

For example, chapter three is titled: “Public Health Quackery.” She wrote of the philosophy of the NIH and CDC at the time:

…a new miasma theory has lately sprung up in schools of public health, holding that racism and sexism, though as unmeasurable as the ancient miasmas, cause AIDS, cancer, drug addiction, and heart disease. Indeed, according public health professors, living in America is acutely hazardous to women and minorities, so shot through is the United States with sickness-producing—even fatal—injustice and bigotry…In other words, some of the very people who claim to be solving public health problems have embraced an ideology that can only make them worse.

The was written 1998, long before the horribly politicized response to COVID-19. So one must ask why neither the Bush nor Trump administrations did anything to change the dangerously misguided philosophical premises underlying America’s public health bureaucracy once MacDonald pointed it out both in her book and a premier neoconservative journal?

The same chapter noted that the keynote speaker at that year’s American Public Health Association’s annual meeting was Rev. Jesse Jackson—obviously not a physician nor an epidemiologist. You didn’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing in 2000. So why did Republican administrations permit the public health establishment to continue blowing against the American public’s health for 20+ years without opposition?

The next chapter is an expose of Critical Race Theory as taught in American law schools, originally published in 1995. Sadly, “Law School Humbug,” reads much like any contemporary article by Christopher F. Rufo. Like MacDonald, Rufo is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Working on the same issue at the same place. Except now CRT has metastasized into K-12 education and everywhere else.

MacDonald wrote at the time:

Race and much feminist theory represent a dangerous flight from reason and logic. A legal system that aspires to objectivity is one of culture’s greatest accomplishments. The fact that, like other human institutions, law does not always live up to its goals is no argument against its trying to do so. The current effort to give law a color and gender or to dismantle it entirely in the name of racial and sexual solidarity would be a giant stop toward unreason.

This was written 27 years ago.

Yet subsequently, the GOP-controlled Congress passed HR 1242 in 2018, aka the “400 Years of Afro-American History Commission Act” which authorized $6 million in taxpayer dollars for:

“…the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Africans in the English colonies, at Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619.”

That is, Republicans paid for the 1619 Project.

Yet today Republicans claim they are shocked that it is doing exactly what Heather MacDonald said it would do. It just doesn’t compute. The problem wasn’t with the intellectuals, it seems—the problem was with Republican leadership not listening to intellectuals like Heather MacDonald.

Did nobody on Capitol Hill in 2018 read City Journal? If anybody did, why did they authorize spending $6 million dollars to promote Critical Race Theory in 2018? And who knows how much more since?

Impressively, MacDonald’s book contains chapter after chapter of articles from the 1990s detailing horrendous problems that are only worse now: “Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach” is an expose of the crypto-communist curriculum at university schools of education (1998); “An F for Hip-Hop” (1998) explaining the horrifying messages of crime, misogyny, racism and violence promoted by the American music industry; “Revisionist Lust: The Smithsonian Today” (1997), details the National Museum’s corruption by ghastly leftist political propaganda; “Homeless Advocates in Outer Space” (1997) reveals how the multi-billion dollar homelessness industry makes matters worse and worse for alcoholics, drug addicts, and the mentally ill in order to garner more federal dollars; “Compassion Gone Mad” (1996) and “Welfares Next Vietnam” (1995) show how the American welfare system generates poverty and illegitimacy; “Foster Care’s Underworld” (1999) documents child welfare policies which destroy children’s lives; and “Diallo Truth, Diallo Falsehood” (1999) closes the book with an account of fraud in the official story of New York’s infamous police brutality and racism case from the last millennium—and how it was used politically to damage Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Her conclusion that “the Diallo crisis was a manufactured one” could equally have been applied to the case of George Floyd, used against President Trump in 2020.

So my conclusion is a little different from MacDonald’s. After reading her book, I don’t think that bad ideas had so much power. Instead, I think that the political class has turned a blind eye to bad ideas and their impact for other reasons—money, power, political influence, perhaps also social climbing and elite acceptance, for knowing the secret passwords has always been a key to acceptance in a powerful hierarchy, even when those repeating shibboleths: Credo quia absurdum.

It was, it turns out, not the power of bad ideas that kept Heather MacDonald’s insights from yielding change, rather it was the tendency of corrupt machine politics to ignore good ideas that allowed both American political parties to bypass her findings from two decades ago—leading to our contemporary travesty of American intellectual life.