The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now , by Daniel J. Mahoney. Encounter Books, 2025, 159 pages, $29.99.
Promising to offer “a full-throated defense of moral and political sanity against the latest eruptions of ideological mendacity in our time,” The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now, is a breath of fresh air. In concise, elegant, and eminently readable prose, Daniel J. Mahoney, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus at Assumption University, castigates the enemies of liberty without the overheated vitriol that exacerbates polarization without enlightening. Having had quite enough of violence and anti-American protests on college campuses, tired of being fed a diet of selective news peddled by non-investigative journalists, most people are eager for a voice of moderation and common sense.
That is just what the book delivers. The erudite, amiable Mahoney does not engage in jeremiads. Rather, he deplores the wholesale attack on language that leads to the sort of polarization and the ensuing erosion of social cohesion that is a sure symptom of creeping totalitarianism. “Ideology always seeks to commandeer and command language, to twist meaning for its own perfidious purposes”—a truth that George Orwell’s runaway bestsellers have captured ingeniously with science fiction and black humor. But the incredible savagery and unbounded violence of which its psychopathic perpetrators proved capable could only be conveyed by someone who barely survived it. That was Solzhenitsyn. It was he who coined the label “ideological lie” and who serves as guiding spirit for this book.
But Solzhenitsyn is not Mahoney’s only interlocutor. Literally meaning “the science of ideas,” ideology was also illustrated by German-born Jewish American philosopher Hannah Arendt, using the prototypical totalitarian regimes of Nazism and Communism. Having carried Marxist scientism to its seductive illogical conclusion, she wrote in her epic Origins of Totalitarianism, they both “pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process—the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future—because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas.” That the past keeps revealing itself as new archeological evidence emerges, while present knowledge is a tiny fraction of what lies beyond, is denied with chutzpah so extreme that one wonders how it could ever appeal on rational grounds. It does not—the essence of ideology is not reason but commitment.
Rationally speaking, hypotheses guide expectations that are necessarily subject to falsification. This process physicist and philosopher Karl Polanyi credits for the evolution of scientific knowledge. Using “the classic Popperian frame of interpretation,” Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, a fully recovered ex-Marxist, explains why ideologies “pretend to offer an explanation of the world” as does science, but they soon run into trouble. For since “they are supposed to possess absolute truth and to be testable at the same time,” when reality defies them, they “carry a built-in necessity of lying.” This is where disinformation and censorship come in. But “when the facts cannot be concealed, [ideologies, or rather its manipulators] also need a special psychological technique that prevents believers from seeing these facts.” Such cognitive subterfuge is spiritually cancerous.
The attempt to falsify reality is uncompromising. If we are not prepared to concede that our theories might be wrong, we must eliminate all error. A virulent form of hubris, this assault on truth in the name of truth represents what the German political scientist Eric Voegelin, who found refuge from Nazism in the U.S., called “modernity without restraint.”
Though modernity has no precise starting date, there is general agreement that the totalitarian impulse was unleashed by the French Revolution. Despite its beginnings in a seemingly democratic direction, some of its liberal-minded leaders having been buoyed by the improbable success of the Americans against the British Crown, the floodgates were soon open. Once the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre, a well-educated but deeply flawed character, became inebriated with power, insane terror was unleashed. Until he too was guillotined—the fate of most tyrants, albeit by no means all.
Yet he was not all evil, merely a theomaniac. Mahoney agrees with French philosopher Marcel Gauchet that a rigid totalitarian will and a “disposition to impersonality” together account for Robespierre’s devotion to what he considered a “noble cause.” Having abandoned moral restraint, Robespierre “came to see himself as the ‘divine man’ alluded to by Rousseau,” adding that a “craving for popularity took root in him and flourished.” This turned out to be a more dangerous combination than a personal desire to do harm.
Mahoney observes that Lenin shared the same psychological traits. Both are representative of a malaise that seems to afflict with particular severity the most educated. An elite ideocracy, convinced of their ability to detect the march of history , becomes consumed by hatred and pure negation. They embody the spirit of Germany’s most celebrated poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s sinister Mephistopheles, who tells Faust: Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint: “I am the spirit who always denies, the one who reduces Something to Nothing, and who thereby undoes the work of creation.”
This attitude constitutes “a mix of moral nihilism and rage,” writes Mahoney, a rage that “reveals a crude division of the world that localizes evil in a specific (and utterly dispensable) group of class, race, or gender oppressors, as well as unrelieved contempt for old verities, traditions, and points of view.” The enraged represent Progress; ergo, they are blameless. He credits the German-born Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss with the insight that the tragedy of modernity lies in the replacement of good and evil with “the ever-shifting distinction between “progress and reaction.” Its most recent manifestation is “woke” despotism, which constitutes a “new form of ideological Manichaeism that rivals Jacobinism and Bolshevism in their efforts to morally annihilate ‘enemies of the people.’”
One of the most insightful psychological portraits of this nihilistic mindset appears in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece Devils (or Demons). Mahoney commends the great novelist for his skill in confronting “the spirit of radical negation that defines the modern revolutionary project … [and] the sickness of soul that drives the totalitarian temptation.” The pathetic revolutionary “devils” who reel with resentment, however, are not the sole sick elements of a decaying society on the verge of imploding. No ideologue, Dostoyevsky is a consummate artist who “chronicles the pathetic, slavish deference of liberal society.” While his subject matter is the rich palette of pre-apocalyptic Russia, its relevance to our own world is astonishingly accurate.
Like Dostoyevsky, Mahoney, whose contribution to Solzhenitsyn scholarship is unmatched, embraces the great dissident’s principal insight: that every one of us has the potential for both good and evil. The countless, painstakingly collected, tragedies exposed in The Gulag Archipelago, the most extraordinary literary experiment of the 20th century, constitute evidence for the biblical view of humanity that Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and nihilists rejected. It is the essence of freedom that
the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years… It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to contract it within each person.
The totalitarian impulse is intrinsic to human nature just as the fear of death and the desire for absolute power that would allow man to replace God, to establish a heaven on earth, peace and harmony: an end to history itself.
It held a particular appeal to secular intellectuals. French-Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron, about whom Mahoney has written copiously, was among the few who remained skeptical of the sudden enthusiasm for anti-nationalist globalization, seeing the presumed depoliticization of Western Europe as a pathology rather than a virtue. Having died in 1983, he never witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain. While he would undoubtedly have applauded, he seems to have anticipated that a continent so deeply ravaged by two totalitarianisms would not emerge unscathed. What Aron is unlikely to have imagined was the expansion of Islamism in Europe, abetted by a western elite reeling in guilt, confusion, and self-hatred.
It is self-hatred that most alarms Mahoney, and the ubiquity of a creeping conviction that the world has been “desacralized, shorn of transcendence.” It is manifested in the growing power of the ideological lie that necessarily debases not only those who are forced to submit to it on pain of ostracism and ultimately annihilation, but its enforcers. Because whoever lies debases himself; a debased soul is no soul at all.
Whether or not humanity can resist the lie will determine its very survival. “No permanence, no perseverance in existence,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “can even be conceived of without men willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is.” But the ideological deformation of reality by denying what seems to us empirically true, Mahoney reminds his readers, must be challenged by the simultaneous affirmation of “those enduring verities always worth affirming.” These include decency and moderation which are inseparable from “a thoughtful reaffirmation of ‘liberty under the law,’” which he explains by citing his friend and teacher Pierre Manent as a “law that human beings did not make, as in the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill.’”
This constitutes the core of what Mahoney describes as “the regime of modern liberty, to which I remain deeply committed.” Call it “liberal democracy,” with John O’Sullivan, “true conservatism,” with Anthony T. Kronman, “conservative liberalism” as does economist Daniel B. Klein or, if you prefer, liberal conservatism, it lies at the heart of America’s Founding. No atheists, devoted to constitutional liberty, the Founders were proud of their English and Scottish learning, as well as Hebrew, Christian, Greek, and Roman traditions, and thus by today’s standards, thoroughly conservative. Conservatism and liberalism are inseparable; only ideologues engage in irreconcilable antinomies.
Calling it simply “old-fashioned liberalism,” writes Mahoney, it basically amounts to a “sense of obligation to truth, liberty, and conscience.” Solzhenitsyn captured it beautifully on the day he was exiled to the West, on February 12, 1974, reprinted in The Washington Post as “Live Not by Lies!” Mahoney describes it as “a clarion call for his fellow citizens to recover civic pride and self-respect even in the absence of political and civil liberty.”
In totalitarian societies such as North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, and others along the demonic spectrum, the price of such courage is death—not only one’s own but that of family members and others, implicated or not. That lying persists even in relatively liberal-democratic nations where the stakes are so much less onerous stands as proof of our decadence. The totalitarian impulse never abates entirely, but the ideological lie on which it feeds to legitimize the power of a few who presume to decree what is and what isn’t kosher to say and do, can only persist if we willingly deny the reality of truth. Only by respecting reality can one be free to act and change. As Arendt said it with disarming simplicity: “it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.”
She meant heaven. As does Mahoney. And the rest of us, whether we know it or not.
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