An important book explains the forces sustaining the Ideological Lie that has plagued humanity for centuries.
The line between good and evil passes not through the state, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
If anyone knows that line by heart—and likely every other in the vast works of the great Russian man of letters and thought—it is Daniel J. Mahoney, unrivaled scholar of Solzhenitsyn, and of so many other giants of politics, culture, and the affairs of man and state (Burke, Cicero, Churchill, de Gaulle, Tocqueville). Professor Mahoney is a much-published, influential, and original observer of contemporary affairs—especially of the totalitarian menace that has perverted and maimed them, along with nearly all affairs of mankind since the Bastille’s storming.
In his recent acclaimed book, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (Encounter Books), Mahoney draws on Solzhenitsyn and a broad range of other important thinkers and writers, from the wise to the nefarious, from the champions of freedom to the propagandists of servitude and extremism, to examine our difficult moment—America’s and the world’s—and to understand how it was arrived at, if it is a permanent sentence, the genesis of the mendacity, and whether there is a reasonable path away from “the right side of history” towards a renewed Republic where people understand and yearn for the flourishing of unalienable rights.
What is this thing that persists, this “Ideological Lie,” which alarms the respected conservative political scientist (who but a few years earlier penned another cautionary work for Encounter, The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity)? To Mahoney, it is a trick and stratagem of the modern revolutionary (read: Jacobins, Soviets, Progressives, Maoists, etc.), who takes a hammer to the ethical foundation of Western Civilization (i.e., the distinction between good and evil) and replaces it with a false dichotomy of progress vs. reaction. Tradition abhorred, never restored. The Lie is a poisonous filament that threads between and through different revolutionary eruptions, and that glows brighter when you consider contemporary clamoring to “be on the right side of history,” a refrain of predestination that revolutionary movements hold in common regardless of their other trappings.
Mahoney succeeds in putting forward a tight argument for how and why the Ideological Lie exists, and why it continues to rear its ugly head. His exploration—of post-colonialism, revolutionary negation, uniformity, lost opportunities (1989!), radical relativism, racialism, despotism, and more—portrays the depth and breadth of the lie, and and its origin a deep locus in human nature which, ironically, is one of the first concepts revolutionaries try to displace. Mahoney traces the evolution of the Lie, with many chapters standing alone as specific instances—as does his chapter calling for a societal corrective of “Courage and Moderation.”
There has been some discussion of entering a “post-woke era” in the second year of the second Trump presidency. Shots on goal include executive orders protecting women’s sports, cuts to federal programs pushing DEI, and cuts to funding for those incubative hiveminds of the Ideological Lie known as colleges and universities. The Left has accepted none of these attempts at corrections and continues to push back. In this fevered climate, Mahoney emphasizes how insidious the latest telling of the Ideological Lie is, through what he terms “woke despotism,” and accomplishes this analysis without resorting to the lowest common denominator of name-calling or rage-baiting (as the young'uns say):
Every decent American must reject the quintessentially ideological move of locating evil exclusively in suspect groups who are said to be guilty for who they are and not what they have done . . . nor are some racial or “gender” categories composed exclusively of “innocent victims” bereft of sin and any capacity for wrongdoing. We are all capable of being “victims and executioners,” as Albert Camus reminded us after the Second World War.
Other especially strong chapters in The Persistence of the Ideological Lie deal with Marx and Marxism, 1989, and 1619 (N.B. but for the rule of threes, I would have included 1848, but Mahoney’s discussion of Marx ranges wider than the Manifesto, which I will address in a moment).
In the book’s chapter on "The 1619 Project: Racialism As a New Form of the Lie," Mahoney covers just a few of the outrageous claims made by proponents of what used to be called Afro-pessimism (ontological evil of whites, total exclusion of blacks from society due to the legacy of slavery, with no way to overcome it) and synthesizes their consequence:
Identity politics sees no struggle between good and evil in every human heart, as in the classical and Christian understanding of free will, conscience, and moral responsibility. It has no place for the drama of human existence. Like the totalitarians of old, in numerous institutions in civil society, especially our universities, the new ideologues pronounce who is absolutely guilty and who is innocent and pure, with a monstrous self assurance based on the visible signs of evil and injustice parentheses (e.g., whiteness and “heteronormativity”). Such a world—at once racialist and ideological—becomes a perverse spiritual despotism dominated by tyrannical ideological cliches that allow the woke to dispense with “the guilty” with remarkable impunity and cruelty.
One such racialism claim emanates from the latest edition of the 1619 Project: that the banning of the slave trade in 1808, as encouraged by the Constitution of 1787, may have been motivated not by any higher principles, but rather by a racist desire to keep key Deep South states majority white. Ahistorical charges like this are garden-variety woke racialism in the current year, but there are those pushing back against it. Pulling together critiques from Mary Grabar and Peter Wood, Mahoney closes the chapter with a call to “return to the ‘better angels of our nature,’ who teach salutary self-criticism and civic renewal, not self-loathing and despair.”
Mahoney’s chapter on Marx highlights the book’s structural strength. This chapter, like the others, ends with a “Sources and Suggested Reading List.” A hallmark of Mahoney’s writings which is found in his other books, these conclusive punctuations provide great recommendations for deeper study. Alas, on occasion, this method can disappoint: I wish more had been said on the late Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s appreciation of Marx in this text, especially on the object-level of MacIntyre’s reading vs. Mahoney’s own.
Ever the indefatigable instructor, Mahoney—who was professor of political science at Assumption University for over thirty years, and who currently teaches at Hillsdale College’s political science graduate program—includes an appendix recommending ten essential books for deeper understanding of the Ideological Lie. Your standard heavy-hitters are included, such as Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and the aforementioned Gulag Archipelago, complemented by more recent, compelling works such as Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy and Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies. To humbly suggest an eleventh: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. This satire of 1930s Stalinist Russia, published posthumously due to censorship, comes from a regime critic who was also Stalin’s favorite playwright. It tells of the Devil coming to Moscow, where no one believes in him or God, and the work of a rogue author outside of the bounds of the Massolit (a parody of the Society Union’s Association of Proletarian Writers); one of the most-quoted lines is, “Manuscripts don’t burn.”
As for burning, neither does Reality or Truth, no matter how many lies are told. But what does matter is that we have the sense and courage to recognize, and confront, this particular lie, one that is deeply ideological, unnervingly persistent and pernicious, and a threat to liberty, civil society, and the human soul.
