Daniel J. Mahoney’s taut and potent new book, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now, advances a provocative thesis:
That the ‘ideological’ project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on a renewed virulence in the late modern world, just thirty-five years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989.
The central understanding that drives so much of the success of the West is the implacable fact of man’s fall. This permanent condition can be mitigated with a political order grounded in a recognition of what Evelyn Waugh once called man’s “aboriginal corruption,” with its resultant concupiscence and compromise of reason.
The American Founders established—imperfectly but unquestionably—just this type of political arrangement predicated on Madisonian realism about man’s very real limits. But just as the eighteenth century gave birth to the American constitutional republic, it also produced an opposite drive toward reality-distorting utopia, as Mahoney argues.
The tension between, on the one hand, freedom derived from “the natural order of things”—as Mahoney phrases it—and, on the other, the ideological lie is at the center of The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, which exposes the essential misanthropy of the utopian project with uncommon intelligence and rhetorical force. It is also a valuable statement of the countervailing virtues embedded in our civilization.
The Persistence of the Ideological Lie is primarily an erudite exploration of the sources of the ideological rot of our time: there are superb chapters on Robespierre and the French Revolution, Marx and Marxism, and the insights into revolutionary nihilism found in Dostoevsky’s Demons.
Moreover, when Mahoney turns to concrete contemporary examples of ideological disease, his analysis takes flight. The self-hatred of postcolonial ideology is meticulously investigated, and Mahoney is relentless in hunting down the corruption of the 1619 Project.
As to the latter, he shows no quarter to what he correctly calls “a debilitating cult of racial resentment and victimization.” With lavish funding from innumerable elite institutions, the cynical mendacity of the 1619 Project has worked its way termite-like into all areas of American life through the hijacking of education. The result, of course, has been uniformly deleterious.
This doctrine of resentment-based identity politics is contrasted by Mahoney with a healthy culture that “teach[es] salutary self-criticism and civic renewal, not self-loathing and despair.”
To be sure, Mahoney’s work is a book about books, and it thus has an inside-baseball quality that may limit its appeal to some readers. Also, there are occasional missteps: for example, he wastes space praising the overpraised Bari Weiss.
Nevertheless, his critique of the regime of ideology is very astute. Crucially, it is leavened with a genuinely conservative sensibility. In fact, with his advocacy of conservative moderation, he supplies a map to find the way out of the ideological jungle and thereby saves the book from being another (very cerebral) what’s-wrong-with-the-world jeremiad.
Mahoney sounds like a familiar voice who invariably opposed the ravages of ideology with the permanent things (namely, William F. Buckley Jr.) when he argues that “true moderation requires what the classics called ‘order in the soul,’ salutary self-control and self-limitation guided by right reason, and not the emancipation of the human will from all humanizing—and civilizing—restraints.”
Too many contemporary liberals and centrists have forgotten the crucial moral, cultural, and spiritual preconditions of our political order. They dispense with them with remarkable ease. But liberty without law, including the moral law, is unworthy of human beings and is ultimately not in accord with the order of things.” Mahoney’s voice is one of sanity in the middle of the asylum.
With The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, Mahoney has cleared the air of ideology in a very bracing and satisfying way. His theme is direct and sobering: “Human beings have a nature, and we forget that elementary truth at our peril.” This book is an act of eloquent recollection of that truth.
• Related at CWR: “Knowing and rejecting the Ideological Lie: An interview with Daniel J. Mahoney” (April 10, 2025) by Carl E. Olson
The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now
By Daniel J. Mahoney
Encounter Books, 2025
Hardover, 168 pages
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It has always been the same old story, the same old ideological lie, that apart from The True God, “Ye can be like gods, declaring what is Good and what is evil.
The Truth Is:
“When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.” – Pope Benedict’s Christmas Address 2012
At the heart of Liberty Is Christ, “4For it is impossible for those who were once illuminated, have tasted also the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5Have moreover tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come…”, to not believe that Christ’s Sacrifice On The Cross will lead us to Salvation, but we must desire forgiveness for our sins, and accept Salvational Love, God’s Gift Of Grace And Mercy; believe in The Power And The Glory Of Salvation Love, and rejoice in the fact that No Greater Love Is There Than This, To Desire Salvation For One’s Beloved. “Hail The Cross, Our Only Hope.” “Blessed are they who are Called to The Marriage Supper Of The Lamb.” “For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”
The problem doesn’t begin with believing the lie… that’s a symptom. The problem is the lack of fear and respect for the truth. The fear of the Lord is THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM.
Gregory, exactly what are you saying? 🫣
Victimization is a long practiced ideology now becoming standard. Test anyone’s reason for failure and you will understand.
Admiration is hard to resist regarding Mahoney’s “the cynical mendacity of the 1619 Project [that] has worked its way termite-like into all areas of American life”. Bravo professor emeritus. We hear this constant whining from the Party of persistent victimhood. Beyond 1619 to all forms of imagined victimization.
Mahoney’s outlook is very Christian very realistic taking into account our fallen nature, our humanness understood within its limitations. That nature of man finds its greatness in its revealed ordering.
Probably a book I should get and hopefully read. IMHO the problems today stem from the expression “Scratch a Liberal Find a Fascist”. A harsh saying for sure, but underlying this expression are two things. First, The new liberals, as the call themselves, are really authoritarians that can’t stand other opinions and want to impose their self righteous ideas on everyone else. They will use anything at there disposal to discredit those people or beliefs they disagree. Second, there belief in God is limited, if any, and they really dislike Christians and in particular Catholics. This is another catalyst for their destructive actions.
Dr. Mahoney is one of our finest political philosophers. I share his admiration for the American project, its sense of natural law/right (combined with an awareness of what is realizable, given the effects of original sin). One wonders, however, if things are just too far gone to restore the original healthy republic, “neither wholly national nor wholly federal.”
Something has been gestating in American politics:
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Pray, pray for this country!
Many form their belief systems, even while professing religious faith, less from what they think they believe about God than what they decide to believe about the nature of evil. If evil is understood as personal, then the human condition is permanently imperfectible, and we can only hope to inspire individual reform. If we decide to believe evil is determined by the tides of history, possibly to escape confronting our own need for reform, we are more inclined to side with the principalities of intellectual elites who view evil as a problem of social engineering, a management problem, which they promise to eliminate once they are allowed to impose their self-anointed vision on the rest of humanity.
Authentic faith teaches that natural principles of how we ought to order our lives together are true, not because of popular acceptance, favor by intellectuals, or enshrinement in statutory law, but are true because they are inherent to the nature of being a decent human being. Only decent individuals acting virtuously can affect honor and justice.
Human vanity resists this idea, even when cognitive dissidence tries to have it both ways. The very capacity for anger reveals we all have innate expectations of one another of how we ought to order our lives, yet we often prefer to focus on finding affinity groups that claim original solutions to humanity’s problems that will eventually lead us to utopia, and who would be scrupulous about personal misdeeds when we’re busy saving the world? Ideologies make the denial of sin easier.
You say,
‘ Only decent individuals acting virtuously can affect honor and justice. Human vanity resists this idea, even when cognitive dissidence tries to have it both ways. ‘
Meaning that you would hold that the first proposition is well-grounded and the second proposition is proved true by it so that “if cognitive dissidence in contained in the presentation”, it inevitably gets exposed because of the well-grounded proposition.
But the first proposition is not well-grounded and the cognitive dissidence item is circular.
In addition to the first proposition being not well-grounded, it may be that depending on the situation, that whole angle of analysis could be totally off track. In which event, unable to catch the mark you then end up altering the good and maligning the cause.
I hope my comment didn’t bring a calamity, Mr. Baker. I hope you see it diverts calamity.
Consider the bishop whose duty it is to make an intervention, where, he however decides nobody in the involved circle has the requisite virtue and one of the group was “just being erudite” and making opportunistic vivid splash of it; and leaves be. He would himself have now descended now into the very quagmire for which he had been preparing himself mentally.
Or consider the opposite, where there is at least some virtue. I make a reference to Ocariz who felt he couldn’t oppose the Pope and went right along with the novelty of reformulating Opus Dei, “We’re called upon to do this REFORM in the name of Escriva by dint of the Pope’s feeling about it and his necessary leadership”; yet thereby necessarily voiding the gift already fulfilled and happily overtaking the demarcation and role of “prelate” and “father”.
One question prompted is – For how long should such business in each case persist?
I failed to elaborate what I thought was self-evident. By human vanity I mean a sinful disposition, and sin always carries with it self-deceptions about not being a sinner. The modern age is inundated with determinist beliefs about the human condition promoted by social science. Ideologues, in their inner life vacillate between identifying evil in the human condition as the product of social forces that can be engineered out of human nature by social management, yet it is humanly impossible to really believe such a falsehood by the realities of everyday life where everyone acts with independent agency. The realities of free will tend to be upsetting to determinist ideologues, described in the language of social science as cognitive dissidence.
Glad of the clarifications.
There still remains -as I am seeing things- the problem of the one with the duty objectively to act, not doing it on an excuse or explanation or qualification, of sinful disposition and the like. Something that can happen among otherwise good people as among a totally disordered group, everything gets stopped up to what it is already. Someone may be a sinner but it doesn’t oblige him to co-operate in sin and his being aware of this and bringing it to the fore demands a just attention upon the thing itself.