A Guide to the Horrified and Mystified 

There is no better guide writing today to the nature and works of the ideological mind and the totalitarian soul than Daniel J. Mahoney, Assumption University professor emeritus of political science and author or editor of nearly twenty books and hundreds of articles and reviews. His latest compact book, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now, distills and packs to overflowing a lifetime of study, reflection, and writing on the titular subjects.    

Because of the complex nature of the phenomena in question (ideology as a form of thought; totalitarianism as an impulse to reengineer the entirety of society in view of such thought; the persistence of both beyond the demise of Soviet Communism), Mahoney has to consider a number of dimensions and levels. In so doing, he employs what one could call “analytic” and “empirical” methods. They mutually illuminate one another: what appears to ordinary consciousness to be destructive madness “makes sense” when seen in its ideological framework. To a considerable extent, by their fruits you shall know them. So far, the fruits have been uniformly bitter. Critical analysis explains why. Ideology is at war with reality and reason, both philosophical and prudential.     

Three Dimensions, Three Chief Guides 

Analytically, the core dimensions to consider are the intellectual, the moral, and the spiritual, as ideology monstrously perverts all three. To help in this endeavor, Mahoney chooses three chief guides, one for each dimension, while bringing in others as need be. The great anti-totalitarian Russian writer and author of the monumental Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, helps us grasp the essential character of Ideology, which is based on a Manichean division of humanity that denies a common humanity and justifies the liquidation of entire segments of humanity because they stand in the way of Progress. Subsequent ideologies may displace the division and the historically culpable group, but they follow the template created earlier.    

Two passages from Solzhenitsyn recur throughout the book and sum up his teaching: “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.” Hence the need for the twin acts of “repentance” and “self-limitation” in a well-conducted human life, and Solzhenitsyn’s teaching that the human vocation is principally the person’s moral and spiritual development, not the transformation of society (a teaching that rules out neither material progress nor the desirability of civic freedom). In stark contrast, there is Ideology, which recasts the human drama of good and evil: “To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good . . .  Ideology—that is what gives evil doing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. This is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes.” Throughout the book, Mahoney lays out that “social theory” as a general concept and in specific later iterations such as “woke ideology,” “anticolonialism,” and “settler colonialism.” Keynotes of the general concept are the aforementioned Manicheanism and a distinctive casting of history in its light, with the whole fueled by rage at human and social imperfection and a repudiation of what has been and is. Nihilism beats in the heart of ideology. 

Mahoney then enlists the Hungarian-British polymath Michael Polanyi, famous for his critique of positivism and insistence on the “personal dimensions” of human knowing, to further dissect “the moral inversion” involved in totalitarianism, whereby its adherents invoke genuine moral values—justice especially, but others as well—while perverting them into justifications for acts of heinous cruelty and injustice. Justifying the unjustifiable is another hallmark of totalitarian thinking. This necessarily requires a perversion of language, as “justice,” “peace,” and so on take on meanings diametrically opposed to the ones they have in ordinary language. Hence the standard tactic of ideologues en route to power, motte-and-bailey. It is not without reason that Mahoney begins his book with George Orwell and the theme of linguistic hygiene.  We must not allow ourselves to become captive to ideological “homonyms,” as Alain Besançon called them.   

Finally, Fyodor Dostoevsky is the most penetrating of authors on “the spiritual pathologies” involved, and his work Devils (or Demons) is unsurpassed at penetrating into the nihilism at work in the souls striving for complete autonomy beyond good and evil, and in the revolutionary souls that combine total negation of the present with the promise of total emancipation in the future in the name of perfect equality. The former draw inspiration from the Devil himself, while the latter are quite clear that cruel despotism is the necessary means to effect the desired leveling: “Cicero’s tongue is cut off, Copernicus’s eyes put out, Shakespeare is stoned.”  Greatness dare not raise its head in the New Order.     

Long a student (and admirer) of human greatness, Mahoney has no trouble showing the loss to individual aspiration and social elevation by this decapitation of excellence. We experienced this feature of ideology in the iconoclasm of the summer of 2020, itself prepared by years of educational indoctrination belittling the Founders and Lincoln. Mahoney devotes an entire chapter to the falsehoods of the 1619 Project and parts of another extolling Lincoln and Fredrick Douglass as embodying the noblest possibilities of “American republicanism,” even in the face of its greatest moral and political failure. Both thought that America had within itself the moral and political resources to live up to its founding promises. Mahoney largely agrees, but would have us today also repair to the deepest levels of Western moral, political, and spiritual wisdom: the greater the repudiation—and we live in many ways in a “culture of repudiation” (Sir Roger Scruton)—the deeper into the wells of life we must go. Judging by the biblical terms and themes of his Second Inaugural, Lincoln would concur. 

Other Guides 

The six authors cited above only begin to indicate the wide range of authors and perspectives from which Mahoney draws. Also included are economists, historians, learned journalists, political scientists, political philosophers, and theologians. For example, journalists Rod Dreher and Christopher Rufo and political scientist Joshua Mitchell help him dissect “soft totalitarianism,” “woke ideology,” and “identity-politics,” respectively, while economists P. T. Bauer and Thomas Sowell and historian Nigel Biggar show how factually challenged “anticolonialism” is. Mahoney’s favorite French interlocutors (some who are friends), Raymond Aron, Alain Besançon, Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, and Dominique Schnapper, all make important contributions. Aron coined the phrase “secular religions,” which nicely captures yet another feature of ideological regimes: they promise this-worldly redemption, by wholly human means. Their (false) presupposition is that man is God.   

Another Mahoney favorite, (the late) Sir Roger Scruton, complements Aron’s insight, while taking the analysis in another, more troubling, direction. “For his part, Scruton saw a Satanic impulse at work in these . . .  projects of . . .  negation.” Given the direct and thoroughgoing assault on God’s beloved creature, His imago, man, in these ideological endeavors, one is warranted to see a demonic hatred of man at work in them. Even George Orwell, himself a nonbeliever, felt compelled to employ theological categories just to describe ideology –at work. At the deepest level, ideology presents a mysterium iniquitatis, which necessarily calls for theological reflection. 

Thus, drawing from A to Z in terms of authors and disciplines, Mahoney’s study is interdisciplinary work of the highest order, required because of the complexity of the topics, and brought together by a voracious reader and expert synthesizer.    

Connecting the Dots 

Having done the necessary analytical work, per his title (“persistence”) and subtitle (“then and now”), Mahoney needs to provide something of a history of ideology. Here we can only provide a few highlights—or revealing low points. 

Historians and political scientists help with the facts of ideology’s history, which range from influential individuals such as Robespierre and Lenin to the martyrs of the Vendée in France during the Terror to the ninety to one hundred million murdered by Communism in the twentieth century (per The Black Book of Communism). Violence, terror, and destruction always accompany ideology-in-power. The biographies of the empowered ideologues are particularly instructive, as they show the intellectual and moral violence that predates and gives rise to the real-world horrors.  Mahoney accordingly devotes a chapter to Robespierre, making good use of a fascinating study of the Immortal by the French political thinker Marcel Gauchet. Here is an instructive counterpart to modern history’s true heroes, the Founders, Lincoln, de Gaulle, and Churchill. 

He next analyzes the admirer of the Jacobins, Marx, laying particular stress on the “four abolitions” of a Communist society announced in the Communist Manifesto: property, family, the nation, and religion. In other words, what gives substance and goodness to human life. This sort of total repudiation is intrinsic to “the Marxism of Marx.” Here we can pause to make a fundamental point. 

The Fundamental Cell of Society 

Destruction of the family is characteristic of Marxism. This is true of all left-wing ideology. (Right-wing ideologies tend to have pro-family policies.)  Here Mahoney would have us measure the stakes involved in the destruction of the monogamous family and, more broadly, in so-called sexual liberation. Speaking of the most recent iteration of this endeavor, “the madness of gender ideology that wars against God’s creation and the natural order of things,” he declares that  

there is no better path to follow than to reaffirm the oldest and deepest truth, the bedrock truth of all political order and moral good sense: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).  This is the palpable truth rooted in both reason and revelation, as well as in the biological nature of human beings. It is inseparable from Natural Law. 

“Reason and revelation,” “God’s creation and the natural order of things,” “the biological nature of human beings,” and “Natural Law”: these are Mahoney’s lodestars and the criteria by which he judges ideology’s destructive evil. 

Today’s Ideologies 

Mahoney then moves on to Marx’s twentieth-century European epigones such as Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. They confronted the failure of Marxism to account for the lack of its reception in Central Europe, where conditions supposedly were ripe for revolution, and its violent implementation in Russia, when Russia was nowhere near those “necessary conditions” for revolution. Both came up with theoretical modifications to classical Marxism: Gramsci calling for an alternative path to revolution, a patient and deliberate takeover of cultural institutions and heights, while Marcuse broke with the class analysis of Marx and designated new “proletariats” for consciousness-raising, thus allowing for a growing catalogue of “victims” of liberal or bourgeois capitalism. He also contributed mightily to the modern construal and emancipation of eros.   

Recent books by Christopher Rufo and Joshua Mitchell help Mahoney survey the resultant contemporary American scene. One should note that Mahoney’s book was sent to press before the election of President Trump to a second term. In its chapters, one relives and “feels” the period before January 20, 2025, during the period of ascendant woke ideology and the orchestrated tyranny (my term) of the Covid era. One relives its coercions, intimidations, and enforced narrative. Happily, the Trump administration is pushing back on all that. One suspects, however, that the formerly ascendant Left’s retreat on various fronts is largely tactical. In any event, Mahoney warns about declaring victory too precipitously. Ideology has shown itself to be a Hydra with many heads. 

The Policing of Language and the Assault on Truth 

“The truth will make you free.” Truth, as both the biblical and classical traditions affirm, is man’s glory and the necessary companion and guide to his other great faculty: free will. Ideology takes direct aim at this essential link between truth and liberty.   

The first chapter of the book accordingly dissects the perverted terms of the woke lexicon: “social justice,” which is antithetical to the justice of human equality and merit; “inclusion,” which excludes the wrong sort (of races, genders, or thought); “diversity,” which is anything but, but rather a form of enforced conformity; and “equity,” which, instead of repairing law’s oversights or heavy-handedness, is discrimination against those who belong to disfavored categories. Orwell was right: in the face of ideology the first duty is linguistic hygiene. Or as Solzhenitsyn said, faced with public lies, one must muster one’s courage, moral and physical, and “live not by lies!”   

This is not always easy; perhaps never easy. It certainly wasn’t recently. The second chapter recalls the “age of enforced uniformity” we experienced during the Biden administration and, especially, the COVID-tyranny (again, my phrase), as our “information oligarchy” (Harvard intellectual historian James Hankins’s fine phrase) tried to enforce a state-truth, aided and abetted by allies in the legacy and social media.  

As I said above, while the Trump administration is pushing back and allowing disinfectant into the room, the proponents of these anti-truth, anti-freedom measures are still among us, including in the aforementioned cultural heights. I suspect that battle against them will continue into the foreseeable future, with unforeseeable twists and turns. Two things, however, are sure: we will need to be able to detect ideology when it rears its ugly head again, and we must already possess the civic courage and moral wherewithal to call it out. In these two regards, we have no better model and guide than Daniel J. Mahoney and this admirably compact book, which distills and points to a lifetime of work countering this enemy of man. 

Image by Sinuswelle and licensed via Adobe Stock.