The Persistence of the Ideological Lie by Daniel J. Mahoney

The Ideological Lie, as Solzhenitsyn calls it, was born when modern revolutionaries replaced the age-old distinction between good and evil with the illusory distinction between progress and reaction. In the name of progress, evil was called goodness, and goodness in the form of wise restraint was labeled evil, backward, racist, colonialist, sexist, etc.

Jacobinism, Marxism-Leninism, National Socialism, Progressive Democracy, the New Left, and now, the new woke dispensation have all iterated upon this central conceit. Their adherents were all frenziedly preoccupied with being on “the right side of history”—the side of “progress.”

In The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, Daniel Mahoney chronicles each manifestation of the Ideological Lie, up to and including contemporary wokeism. He explains how they are marked by the same errors: impatience with piecemeal reform; contempt for self-limiting constitutional order; and the belief that people are guilty for their immutable characteristics—belonging to the wrong class or race—rather than for their actions. He shows how the woke, moved by self-loathing and a disdain for our civic inheritance, are transmuting our so called “democracy” into a new form of despotism.

Mahoney ultimately argues that our failure to learn from the totalitarian tragedy of the twentieth century allowed the ideological virus to metastasize in new and alarming ways. Above all, he takes aim at the omnipresent “culture of repudiation,” as the late Roger Scruton called it, and elucidates multiple paths for overcoming the ideological clichés that continue to deform intellectual and political life today.

Author

DANIEL J. MAHONEY is a professor emeritus at Assumption University (where he taught from 1986 until 2021), a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a senior writer at Law and Liberty. He has written extensively on statesmanship, French political thought, the art and political thought of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, conservatism, religion and politics, and various themes in political philosophy. His most recent books are The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order (2011), The Other Solzhenitsyn (2014, reissued in 2020), and The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity (Encounter Books, 2018). He has written extensively for newspapers and magazines.

Praise

In his chapter on Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, Daniel Mahoney writes that Dostoevsky displays the “ability to bring us back from the brink of nihilistic destruction,” and, many readers will discover, that is true of this book as well. Forceful, incisive, highly intelligent, and gracefully written, it should shape debate on our culture today.

—Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities, Northwestern University

After 1989, as the world sought to put to rest the ideological catastrophe of the twentieth century, Dan Mahoney never stopped warning us, using his masterful command of political theory, that the nihilistic temptations of the twentieth century are permanent features of human life.  Now that the new tyranny of identity politics is upon us, we can do no better than listen intently to one of America’s most important political thinkers for guidance.

—Joshua Mitchell, Department of Government, Georgetown University

No one knows more about the long history of philosophical and political totalitarianism—in both its leftist and rightist manifestations—than the gifted political scientist, philosopher, and intellectual historian Daniel Mahoney. In The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, he carefully examines recent epidemics of political extremism, anti-Western historical revisionism, moral nihilism, cultural relativism, the diversity/equity movement, the 1619 project, and the woke and political correctness hysterias. The result is both an astute survey of what drives such utopianism and year-zero fantasies, and an invaluable warning to us that what ostensibly might start out as ridiculous and dreamy can become very quickly quite “a dangerous and destructive enterprise.”

—Victor Davis Hanson, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, author of The Dying Citizen