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The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now
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 each is marked by the same 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.
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 each is marked by the same 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.
- GenresPhilosophy
168 pages, Hardcover
Published April 15, 2025
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June 7, 2025
The Persistence of the Ideological Lie by Daniel J. Mahoney
This is an erudite book, written in a fine prose style. Daniel J. Mahoney is a scholar of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and a reviewer for the Claremont Review of Books. What I suspect we have here is a collection of his book reviews recast as book chapters dealing with the cultural totalitarianism that has been a noteworthy element of academic culture for the last several decades. In each chapter, Mahoney makes his point by sketching the arguments made in various texts. In doing this, he seduces us into reading those other books, I was seduced into purchasing several books by Ryszard Legutko, of which I have just finished “The Way of the Gadfly.” There are others on my “to read” list thanks to this book.
Because each chapter introduces a new theme or idea, this book is quite congenial to dip in and out of. Each chapter provides a stand-alone discussion that culminates in support of the idea that we are dealing with a recrudescence of the historic enemy of freedom. In each chapter, Mahoney provides observations, sentences, and paragraphs that capture inchoate ideas I had for myself, but express them much better than I could have done by myself.
For example, Mahoney flays the sacred cow of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) in this memorable fashion:
Likewise, the increasingly obligatory alphabetical agitprops must be resisted and challenged. These include DEI—the insidious initialism that justifies the new tyranny of coerced and bureaucratically imposed slogans, doctrines, and programs required by CRT. They include also our new and surreal LGBTQIA++ regime, unremitting in its obsession with “queerness,” “transgenderism,” and sexual “fluidity,” notions unknown to Americans a half generation ago. Again, in classically Orwellian fashion, “diversity” as understood on college campuses and in corporate boardrooms demands absolute ideological uniformity. Blacks and women, and gays for that matter, who think independently or challenge the new “fissionism” (as the sociologist Peter Baehr calls it),5 which denies any normative sexual differences rooted in biological nature between men and women, are relegated to the category of traitors to their race and gender.
Similarly, the once-noble word “equity” has been distorted beyond all recognition. No longer connoting fairness, balance, an effort to adjust a discrepancy, or an exception not covered by the letter of the law (as in Aristotle’s Ethics or the Anglo-American common-law tradition), it now demands a perfect equality of outcomes for every race or ethnic group. As the journalist Barton Swaim put it in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, progressives who invoke this ideological reinvention of equity “believe … against all evidence, that any variance in success among individuals of different races must be the result of conscious or unconscious racism.”6 So understood, “equity” wars with human nature, and would require draconian tyranny if it were to be truly applied in practice. It has also led to patently unfair results—witness the quotas that minimize admissions for Jews and Asians in elite institutions such as Harvard and Yale. Nothing good can result from equity so construed except injustice, tyranny, and racial and social conflict, a new war of all against all.
“Inclusion” is equally dishonest and no less Orwellian: Those who believe in the color-blind constitution, who do not loathe their country, and who believe in the old verities and morality are not welcome in the woke university, law firm, corporation, or media outlet. The woke “community” is in truth as exclusionary as it gets. More broadly, DEI is a classic example of what the anti-totalitarian dissidents behind the Iron Curtain in the days before 1989 called the “Ideological Lie,” a term popularized by Solzhenitsyn. Those who choose to live in its fictive “Second Reality,” as Eric Voegelin so suggestively called it, quickly lose contact with the most elementary realities. In the end, they risk losing the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, good from evil, to see what even an open-eyed child can see. There is a better way, one in tune with the best resources of Western and American civic traditions.
Mahoney, J. Daniel. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (pp. 16-17). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
Mahoney’s citation of ideas is encyclopedic. He mentions Edmund Burke, Albert Camus, Maximilien Robespierre, Pope John Paul II, Vaclav Havel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Michael Polanyi, and others. I made a good list of “to read” while reading this book, picking up a book on Robespierre, “The Possessed” by Dostoyevsky, and promising myself to read the Polanyi book I have on my shelf.
Solzhenitsyn is a constant touchpoint. Solzhenitsyn’s observation that “the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being” is referred to on several occasions. [1] It is chilling to think that just like the citizens of Soviet Russia, we are struggling with “universal, obligatory force-feeding with lies, e.g., What is a woman? Do boys pretending to be girls really have an athletic advantage? Was President Biden mentally competent, or were our doubts a “cheapfake”? Was COVID-19 released from a Chinese laboratory? Is America in the 21st century irredeemably racist? Are police hunting down thousands of unarmed black men? Etc. Listen to Solzhenitsyn about his dilemma and solution:
Solzhenitsyn finds the path to liberation through a self-conscious decision by sturdy, self-respecting souls not to participate in lies: “Personal non-participation in lies!” (TSR, 558) as he strikingly puts it in the imperative (Václav Havel would reformulate this imperative as “living in truth” in his well-known 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” an essay where he favorably cites Solzhenitsyn no less than four times). Already in the 1973 letter, Solzhenitsyn had proclaimed the “universal, obligatory force-feeding with lies” to be the “most agonizing aspect of existence” in the Soviet Union, “worse than all our material miseries, worse than any lack of civil liberties” (EW, 127). Of course, he noted, no one is morally obliged to scream the truth at the top of his lungs in the public square (TSR, 558). But persons of integrity must not knowingly reinforce the web of totalitarian mendacity. Men and women of good will must not denounce coworkers or neighbors who are charged with self-evident lies by a lawless state just as we must resist a cruelly censorious cancel culture and the intoxication of brutal Twitter (now “X”) mobs. This path of nonparticipation in lies will entail sacrifices, perhaps the loss of jobs or the barring of children from promising careers, but not the inevitable internment in prison or camp characteristic of the Stalin (and even Lenin) years in the Soviet Union. When Solzhenitsyn wrote his searing manifesto in early 1974, the edifice of ideological mendacity was already “flaking” as he put it, and would soon be exposed for the whole world to see. The situation demanded a judicious combination of personal steadfastness, spiritual integrity, and civic courage (TSR, 558).
Mahoney, J. Daniel. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (pp. 34-35). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
Speaking the truth, can be dangerous to social standing. I am hanging on by a thread at Medium because I dared to question the goodness of “castrating boys” …. I mean “gender affirming care.” I was kicked off Amazon for questioning the claims made by “Black Lives Matter” ideologue, Ibrahim X. Kendi. There is no KGB about to kick in my door, but the repercussions I will experience are very real and go far beyond those known acts of retaliation. This is the world we live in.
Mahoney makes this sad observation about the habituation of lies:
The ideological Left’s claim to a monopoly of truth is thus impossible to countenance. It is also a significant departure from an earlier leftism that was all about jettisoning the very idea of truth. Just a few years ago, former President Barack Obama, a moderate leftist, told us that democracy is incompatible with any affirmation of “absolute truth.”3 The famous, or once-famous, pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty insisted that everything is “contingent” all the way down—there is in the end no truth and no knowable or ascertainable structure of reality. Indeed, he once expressed incredulity in the pages of the New Republic (July 1991) that the late Václav Havel could sincerely advocate “living in truth,”4 because there is no such thing as normatively binding truth. The postmodern Left, once relativistic from top to bottom and disdainful of a normative human nature and a binding moral law, now claims to speak the Truth and nothing but the Truth on all political matters. Should we be credulous enough to fall for this self-evident lie? I hardly think so.
Mahoney, J. Daniel. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (pp. 23-24). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
A solution can be found in the recent struggles with the Totalitarian Impulse:
The Resurgence of the Real
Those who showed most clarity about the Ideological Lie knew that political, religious, and national freedom could not be attained by a revolution in the conventional sense of the term. The Lie needed to be challenged, openly, truthfully, in the spirit of the indomitable Saint George slaying the dragons of old. Pope John Paul II did this when he evoked eternal and temporal truths that were denied by the ideological regime and were so central to the restoration of political, intellectual, religious, and national freedom. In 1983, speaking to young Poles at the sacred site of Jasna Gora, he beckoned them to reject fear, and “to be a person of conscience.”3 No Rortyan moral relativism or Kojèvian historicism there.
The Poles, the pope insisted, must learn once again to call good and evil by their names and to never confuse one for the other. They must have the courage to recover the “common inheritance whose name is Poland.” Here, and in his great 1993 book Memory and Identity, Pope John Paul II spoke as a proud and principled Polish patriot, one who recognized the nation as a “natural human association.” He knew that a patriotism worthy of the name would have a significant “historical price.” Poles are not “so easily free”: they must fight for it over and over again if need be. This was their fate, and their great privilege. This is far from the spirit of Kojève’s last man at the end of History, content with personal enjoyments and a posthistorical descent into hedonism, softness, and self-indulgence. Pope John Paul II called on Poles to be neither hard (aggressive and cruel) nor soft (passive and morally indifferent). Instead, he called on them to be both Christians and patriots (a call, truth be told, unthinkable under this “Franciscan” pontificate).
Mahoney, J. Daniel. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (p. 94). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
To lovers of Western culture, or those who wonder how we got here and how we can get out of this insane place, I recommend this book.
Footnotes
[1] “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” – The Gulag Archipelago. [Mahoney, J. Daniel. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (p. vii). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.]
This is an erudite book, written in a fine prose style. Daniel J. Mahoney is a scholar of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and a reviewer for the Claremont Review of Books. What I suspect we have here is a collection of his book reviews recast as book chapters dealing with the cultural totalitarianism that has been a noteworthy element of academic culture for the last several decades. In each chapter, Mahoney makes his point by sketching the arguments made in various texts. In doing this, he seduces us into reading those other books, I was seduced into purchasing several books by Ryszard Legutko, of which I have just finished “The Way of the Gadfly.” There are others on my “to read” list thanks to this book.
Because each chapter introduces a new theme or idea, this book is quite congenial to dip in and out of. Each chapter provides a stand-alone discussion that culminates in support of the idea that we are dealing with a recrudescence of the historic enemy of freedom. In each chapter, Mahoney provides observations, sentences, and paragraphs that capture inchoate ideas I had for myself, but express them much better than I could have done by myself.
For example, Mahoney flays the sacred cow of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) in this memorable fashion:
Likewise, the increasingly obligatory alphabetical agitprops must be resisted and challenged. These include DEI—the insidious initialism that justifies the new tyranny of coerced and bureaucratically imposed slogans, doctrines, and programs required by CRT. They include also our new and surreal LGBTQIA++ regime, unremitting in its obsession with “queerness,” “transgenderism,” and sexual “fluidity,” notions unknown to Americans a half generation ago. Again, in classically Orwellian fashion, “diversity” as understood on college campuses and in corporate boardrooms demands absolute ideological uniformity. Blacks and women, and gays for that matter, who think independently or challenge the new “fissionism” (as the sociologist Peter Baehr calls it),5 which denies any normative sexual differences rooted in biological nature between men and women, are relegated to the category of traitors to their race and gender.
Similarly, the once-noble word “equity” has been distorted beyond all recognition. No longer connoting fairness, balance, an effort to adjust a discrepancy, or an exception not covered by the letter of the law (as in Aristotle’s Ethics or the Anglo-American common-law tradition), it now demands a perfect equality of outcomes for every race or ethnic group. As the journalist Barton Swaim put it in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, progressives who invoke this ideological reinvention of equity “believe … against all evidence, that any variance in success among individuals of different races must be the result of conscious or unconscious racism.”6 So understood, “equity” wars with human nature, and would require draconian tyranny if it were to be truly applied in practice. It has also led to patently unfair results—witness the quotas that minimize admissions for Jews and Asians in elite institutions such as Harvard and Yale. Nothing good can result from equity so construed except injustice, tyranny, and racial and social conflict, a new war of all against all.
“Inclusion” is equally dishonest and no less Orwellian: Those who believe in the color-blind constitution, who do not loathe their country, and who believe in the old verities and morality are not welcome in the woke university, law firm, corporation, or media outlet. The woke “community” is in truth as exclusionary as it gets. More broadly, DEI is a classic example of what the anti-totalitarian dissidents behind the Iron Curtain in the days before 1989 called the “Ideological Lie,” a term popularized by Solzhenitsyn. Those who choose to live in its fictive “Second Reality,” as Eric Voegelin so suggestively called it, quickly lose contact with the most elementary realities. In the end, they risk losing the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, good from evil, to see what even an open-eyed child can see. There is a better way, one in tune with the best resources of Western and American civic traditions.
Mahoney, J. Daniel. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (pp. 16-17). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
Mahoney’s citation of ideas is encyclopedic. He mentions Edmund Burke, Albert Camus, Maximilien Robespierre, Pope John Paul II, Vaclav Havel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Michael Polanyi, and others. I made a good list of “to read” while reading this book, picking up a book on Robespierre, “The Possessed” by Dostoyevsky, and promising myself to read the Polanyi book I have on my shelf.
Solzhenitsyn is a constant touchpoint. Solzhenitsyn’s observation that “the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being” is referred to on several occasions. [1] It is chilling to think that just like the citizens of Soviet Russia, we are struggling with “universal, obligatory force-feeding with lies, e.g., What is a woman? Do boys pretending to be girls really have an athletic advantage? Was President Biden mentally competent, or were our doubts a “cheapfake”? Was COVID-19 released from a Chinese laboratory? Is America in the 21st century irredeemably racist? Are police hunting down thousands of unarmed black men? Etc. Listen to Solzhenitsyn about his dilemma and solution:
Solzhenitsyn finds the path to liberation through a self-conscious decision by sturdy, self-respecting souls not to participate in lies: “Personal non-participation in lies!” (TSR, 558) as he strikingly puts it in the imperative (Václav Havel would reformulate this imperative as “living in truth” in his well-known 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” an essay where he favorably cites Solzhenitsyn no less than four times). Already in the 1973 letter, Solzhenitsyn had proclaimed the “universal, obligatory force-feeding with lies” to be the “most agonizing aspect of existence” in the Soviet Union, “worse than all our material miseries, worse than any lack of civil liberties” (EW, 127). Of course, he noted, no one is morally obliged to scream the truth at the top of his lungs in the public square (TSR, 558). But persons of integrity must not knowingly reinforce the web of totalitarian mendacity. Men and women of good will must not denounce coworkers or neighbors who are charged with self-evident lies by a lawless state just as we must resist a cruelly censorious cancel culture and the intoxication of brutal Twitter (now “X”) mobs. This path of nonparticipation in lies will entail sacrifices, perhaps the loss of jobs or the barring of children from promising careers, but not the inevitable internment in prison or camp characteristic of the Stalin (and even Lenin) years in the Soviet Union. When Solzhenitsyn wrote his searing manifesto in early 1974, the edifice of ideological mendacity was already “flaking” as he put it, and would soon be exposed for the whole world to see. The situation demanded a judicious combination of personal steadfastness, spiritual integrity, and civic courage (TSR, 558).
Mahoney, J. Daniel. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (pp. 34-35). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
Speaking the truth, can be dangerous to social standing. I am hanging on by a thread at Medium because I dared to question the goodness of “castrating boys” …. I mean “gender affirming care.” I was kicked off Amazon for questioning the claims made by “Black Lives Matter” ideologue, Ibrahim X. Kendi. There is no KGB about to kick in my door, but the repercussions I will experience are very real and go far beyond those known acts of retaliation. This is the world we live in.
Mahoney makes this sad observation about the habituation of lies:
The ideological Left’s claim to a monopoly of truth is thus impossible to countenance. It is also a significant departure from an earlier leftism that was all about jettisoning the very idea of truth. Just a few years ago, former President Barack Obama, a moderate leftist, told us that democracy is incompatible with any affirmation of “absolute truth.”3 The famous, or once-famous, pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty insisted that everything is “contingent” all the way down—there is in the end no truth and no knowable or ascertainable structure of reality. Indeed, he once expressed incredulity in the pages of the New Republic (July 1991) that the late Václav Havel could sincerely advocate “living in truth,”4 because there is no such thing as normatively binding truth. The postmodern Left, once relativistic from top to bottom and disdainful of a normative human nature and a binding moral law, now claims to speak the Truth and nothing but the Truth on all political matters. Should we be credulous enough to fall for this self-evident lie? I hardly think so.
Mahoney, J. Daniel. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (pp. 23-24). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
A solution can be found in the recent struggles with the Totalitarian Impulse:
The Resurgence of the Real
Those who showed most clarity about the Ideological Lie knew that political, religious, and national freedom could not be attained by a revolution in the conventional sense of the term. The Lie needed to be challenged, openly, truthfully, in the spirit of the indomitable Saint George slaying the dragons of old. Pope John Paul II did this when he evoked eternal and temporal truths that were denied by the ideological regime and were so central to the restoration of political, intellectual, religious, and national freedom. In 1983, speaking to young Poles at the sacred site of Jasna Gora, he beckoned them to reject fear, and “to be a person of conscience.”3 No Rortyan moral relativism or Kojèvian historicism there.
The Poles, the pope insisted, must learn once again to call good and evil by their names and to never confuse one for the other. They must have the courage to recover the “common inheritance whose name is Poland.” Here, and in his great 1993 book Memory and Identity, Pope John Paul II spoke as a proud and principled Polish patriot, one who recognized the nation as a “natural human association.” He knew that a patriotism worthy of the name would have a significant “historical price.” Poles are not “so easily free”: they must fight for it over and over again if need be. This was their fate, and their great privilege. This is far from the spirit of Kojève’s last man at the end of History, content with personal enjoyments and a posthistorical descent into hedonism, softness, and self-indulgence. Pope John Paul II called on Poles to be neither hard (aggressive and cruel) nor soft (passive and morally indifferent). Instead, he called on them to be both Christians and patriots (a call, truth be told, unthinkable under this “Franciscan” pontificate).
Mahoney, J. Daniel. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (p. 94). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
To lovers of Western culture, or those who wonder how we got here and how we can get out of this insane place, I recommend this book.
Footnotes
[1] “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” – The Gulag Archipelago. [Mahoney, J. Daniel. The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (p. vii). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.]
December 2, 2025
Intersectionality is the order of the day - everyone must unthinkingly parrot demands for CRT, gender ideology, abortion on demand, environmental extremism, sympathy and support for radical regimes and ideologies, contempt for religion and traditional morality and hatred for the West - and above all Isreal which is freely and ludicrously compared to apartheid South Africa and most obscenely Nazi Germany.
Communism is anti - human supporting the end of property, family, Christianity, individualism and capitalism. Wherever it has been tried it has failed such as the former Soviet Union or North Korea. Meanwhile China is a monster combining the worth of capitalism and communism together. China has turned into a police and surveillance state that would make Orwell blush.
The book reaches its apogee on Dostoevsky and the spirit of revolutionary negation. Mahoney digs into "The Demons" which is about the dead end and corruption of leftist revolutions. Their ideology leads to nihilism and murder. The book also devotes a chapter to the distortions of the 1619 project and sets the record straight on Lincoln, Douglas and slavery itself and why the Civil War mattered.
In The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, Daniel Mohoney lays out the truth about wokeism. He explains how left ideologies stumble into the same errors: impatient with reforms, contempt for the constitutional order and a belief that people are guilty based on the wrong class or their race rather than their actions. The ideological lie is pushing us into a new dystopia. The book is thought provoking and worth looking into.
Communism is anti - human supporting the end of property, family, Christianity, individualism and capitalism. Wherever it has been tried it has failed such as the former Soviet Union or North Korea. Meanwhile China is a monster combining the worth of capitalism and communism together. China has turned into a police and surveillance state that would make Orwell blush.
The book reaches its apogee on Dostoevsky and the spirit of revolutionary negation. Mahoney digs into "The Demons" which is about the dead end and corruption of leftist revolutions. Their ideology leads to nihilism and murder. The book also devotes a chapter to the distortions of the 1619 project and sets the record straight on Lincoln, Douglas and slavery itself and why the Civil War mattered.
In The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, Daniel Mohoney lays out the truth about wokeism. He explains how left ideologies stumble into the same errors: impatient with reforms, contempt for the constitutional order and a belief that people are guilty based on the wrong class or their race rather than their actions. The ideological lie is pushing us into a new dystopia. The book is thought provoking and worth looking into.
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