The idea that politics could or should have any input into science is anathema to skeptics. They often bring out the examples of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, or the racial science of Nazi Germany, to illustrate the dangers of allowing science to be contaminated by political ideology. They less often acknowledge that racial science was not unique to Nazi Germany, and that the same kind of racist garbage was enthusiastically pursued by scientists in the most enlightened liberal democracies of the time, and found in all the standard British and American anthropology textbooks. Eugenics, including racial eugenics, wasn’t just supported by Nazis, but by people who considered themselves among the vanguard of all that was good and progressive. Liberal democracy was no guard against the influence of political ideology on scientific thought. (On the contrary, liberal democracy is a political ideology that influences scientific thought.)
What’s more, skeptics never acknowledge that racial science was defeated by political ideology, and not by science itself. In fact, there was nothing that could have defeated it within the empirical framework of racial scientists. Their racist experiments confirmed their racist hypotheses based on their racist observations. But while the science supported them, politics, in the aftermath of World War 2 and the Holocaust, did not. After 1945, racial science became politically unacceptable in western liberal democracies, and remains so in spite of the various attempts to revive it. It was not disproved by the scientific method; instead, the political ideologies behind racial science were discarded, and replaced by new ones that did not accommodate it.
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This is a very good observation. Science alone cannot self-correct if the scientific field itself is inextricably tied to politics and ideology. Racial “science” is one example of this, but so is economics, and so is history. Most scientific fields are not math or physics, where it is possible to see them as entirely separate from the political realm. Any discipline that studies anything where a human element is involved is inevitably going to have a political-ideological element embedded in it.
Even Marxism which is the most solidly scientific and empirical out of all the economic theories did not emerge out of purely sterile and academic scientific studies conducted in a political vacuum. It emerged on a background of ongoing class struggles and profound changes in society, in the way society was organized and in the way that people thought of themselves and their relationship to society, the economy, the state, etc. Social science reflects rather than drives changes in society.