The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now
By Daniel J. Mahoney.
Encounter Books, 2025.
Hardcover, 168 pages, $29.99.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.
At the beginning of The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, Daniel J. Mahoney points to the harmful nature of ideology and its damaging effects in present-day society. “Every decent American,” he writes, “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.” This, he states, is “the heart of the matter and the core theme of this book,” a theme that the author develops in both historical and contemporary examples and that he examines in the context of philosophy, religion, literature, and art over a period stretching from classical times to the present.
Needless to say, Mahoney has taken on an ambitious task: a sweeping examination of the nature, history, and consequences of the ideology that permeates almost all of modern existence, particularly in an America in which race, class, and gender have become the default mental settings for much public discourse. What the author seeks is an outright rejection of the reliance on ideology and a return to traditional conceptions of the human condition. As he understands it, one lives today under the yoke of a dishonest condition that represses civilized thought and behavior and that has warped and inverted our understanding of such basic concepts as the nature of liberty, the importance of religious faith, and the inherent differences between men and women. The woke thinking that has evolved over the past forty years represents a descent into thuggery and intimidation, not an advance in civilization. In opposition to wokeism, we must return to traditional moral and religious concepts, including the bedrock notion that man was created by God in his own image.
Much of what Mahoney writes will be familiar to conservatives and moderates, if not to true-believers on the left who have long ago dismissed such ideas as faith and liberty as mere abstractions or “superstructure.” The author’s thinking is grounded in an enduring body of Judeo-Christian thought and in the ideals of the American revolution, and his prescription for liberation from the Ideological Lie is equally traditional: we must reject the mistaken belief that Western civilization is responsible for all the world’s ills, the idea that men and women are identical in all of their predispositions and abilities, the falsehood that authority must always be challenged and found wanting, and the lie that existence is purposeless or perhaps even maleficent. From the destructive anarchy of the French Revolution and the unrestrained violence of fascism and communism to the mental straitjacket of contemporary DEI and wokeism and their silencing or “canceling” of opposing opinions, ideological thinking has resulted in the virtual enslavement of man. Even in America, with its long history of personal freedoms and democratic ideals, we are nearing the precipice of a state of totalitarianism that would involve a monopoly on thought by progressives and permanent one-party rule.
Mahoney has much to say about the “pseudoscientific” nature of Marxism that underlies so much of this cultural and political decline, and, as often in this book, his analysis is both incisive and uncompromising. As for many who have read Marx with unbiased eyes and have come away skeptical, Mahoney finds Marx’s rejection of natural law and all forms of idealism to be a crude and unsophisticated sort of “materialism that has no place for authentic moral judgment or for salutary self-restraint.” Marxism, of course, is at the heart of the Ideological Lie that has spread throughout our schools, media, government, and intellectual life, and, as Mahoney sees it, Marxism is little more than a blind adolescent cry for the sort of radical perfection that does not and can not exist in actual human societies. In every case where it has been tried, Marxism has produced immense suffering as tyrants seize control in the name of social justice, only to enslave the masses for the benefit of a small vanguard of revolutionaries. It goes without saying that such politics is anti-democratic, atheistic, and antithetical to human freedom.
Certainly, we live in a time influenced by what Roger Scruton called “the culture of antagonism” and what, from a different perspective, René Girard with great insight referred to as “anti-Christian Christianity.” This cultural alienation is driven by a willful opposition to all that is good and decent, and that can only view the world through the lens of perverse hostility toward all that would suggest that man was indeed created in the image of God and that life is positive and meaningful. Kindness, idealism, aspiration, loyalty, and goodness play no role in the antagonist culture because that culture is inherently nihilistic and hurtful. All of the values that were at play in America’s founding and, more broadly, in the development of Judeo-Christian civilization over the past two millennia have been targeted and rejected by the Left. This rejection of our moral birthright amounts to “ideological Manichæism, the temptation of ideologues and revolutionaries everywhere to localize evil and see its embodiment in suspect groups” such as white males, heterosexuals, Christians, and the middle class. What has arisen in America is in fact nothing less than a totalitarian mindset bent on violence against and cancellation of those seemingly tainted groups and their replacement by other “virtuous” groups of ethnic minorities, homosexuals, transgenders, socialists, and atheists.
One of the virtues of Mahoney’s book is that, by locating so many discrete elements of modern experience in historical context, he generates a compelling vision of the origins and consequences of our current woke and antagonist culture. With good reason, the author insists that we must be guided by “the lessons of experience,” yet it appears, as with the rise of a frightful new wave of antisemitism, that a large proportion of our citizenry has not learned those lessons and may not even be aware of the existence of past abuses. If Mahoney is right and contemporary thinking is increasingly governed by ideology, the consequences will be no more favorable than in the past. We have already witnessed our own version of fascist brown-shirts disrupting speeches by moderates and conservatives, responding to the police with violence, and occupying entire sections of our cities. It is frightening to consider what the next step in this anarchic process may be, but it is unlikely that it will be peaceful or democratic.
The author offers a profound analysis of this cultural decline based on a lifetime of careful reflection and reading. His accounts of such thinkers and events as the French Revolution, Soviet communism, DEI and wokeism, Robespierre, Tocqueville, Marx, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Polanyi, Scruton, Christopher Rufo, and Thomas Sowell are highly perceptive and informed, and his ability to readily locate contemporary events within this rich historical context is impressive. Mahoney also documents the manner in which humane and altruistic elements of existence, and even those of self-responsibility and legitimate aspiration, have been rejected by such theorists as Michel Foucault and the countless number of imitators and lesser minds that comprise the woke, DEI, and race and gender movements. The pure love of parents and grandparents, the devotion of spouses and friends, the kindness and self-sacrifice of teachers and mentors, and the idealistic faith in Christian teachings of love have been rendered suspect and undermined by the corrosive cynicism of leftist thinking. What we are seeing, as Mahoney puts it, is a “tumultuous revolt against decency, restraint, and humanizing authority,” a revolt that seeks to “transform” society, but to what end?
The pathway back from the precipice is a counterrevolutionary rejection of the Ideological Lie in all its forms. Those who oppose the progressive transformation of society must learn to unabashedly resist leftist ideology and to courageously assert what they know to be true. This resistance does not rely on extremism or intimidation: it is inherently moderate because it celebrates the fact that everything we know about human nature and natural law has already been known and that our choice is simply between a return to familiar inherited values or a further plunge into ever more radical progressive innovations of thought.
In The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, Daniel J. Mahoney constructs a very strong case for the necessity of resistance to progressive change and to the woke thinking that accompanies it. As he writes in the conclusion, “The road forward is steep, but the resources for civilizational renewal are still available to all those who seek them.” In the course of this book, Mahoney clarifies exactly what these “resources” are, and his stark and unyielding depiction of the consequences of failure makes it clear that progressivism must be understood as a stage toward totalitarianism and that it must be opposed by way of reasoned argument. What Mahoney refers to as the Ideological Lie is everywhere apparent in our culture, and the task of reversing it is daunting but all the more necessary. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie constitutes a kind of guidebook to intellectual resistance, and as such, it is a highly useful and important work.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
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