An erudite exploration of the sources of ideological rot

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