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 errors: impatience with piecemeal reform, contempt for self-limiting constitutional order, and the belief that people are guilty for their immutable characteristics-belong