What Solzhenitsyn called the ideological lie was not limited to a single country, government, or movement. And it did not, unfortunately, die off in 1989. In his new book, Daniel Mahoney presents the lie as the replacement of traditional categories of good and evil with progress and reaction, a change that ripples through political and social ideas in a way that opens the door to the replacement of truth by an imposed, false reality. Though we shouldnt pretend that America today approaches the kind of tyranny seen in the twentieth century, we should recognize that the totalitarian impulse is alive and well.

　　Related Links The Persistence of the Ideological Lie by Daniel J. Mahoney

　　Transcript James Patterson:

　　Welcome to the Law Liberty podcast. Im your host, James Patterson. Law Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy books, and culture and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

　　Hello and welcome to the Law Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law Liberty. With me today is Daniel J. Mahoney, Professor Emeritus at Assumption University, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a senior writer here at Law Liberty. And he has written extensively on statesmanship, French political thought, the art of political thought of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, conservatism, religion and politics, and various themes in political philosophy. His most recent books are The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order, The Other Solzhenitsyn, The Idol of Our Age, How Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity—definitely one of my favorites—The Statesman as Thinker, and now most recently, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now. Dr. Mahoney, welcome to the Law Liberty Podcast.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　Oh, really happy to be here, James.

　　James Patterson:

　　I cant believe those are starting just in 2011, you were a man of great, prolific writing. How do you do it?

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　Well, Ive always been somebody who is convinced that thinking and writing go hand in hand. And so Ive always been an extremely avid reader. So from time to time, which is every couple of years, a theme comes upon me that needs to be addressed in a more thorough and systematic way, and I pursue that subject, or I often find myself already pursuing that subject. So Im halfway done with a book when I realize this is a book. The other thing is I like to write, and I think Im a pretty good writer, so that makes a big difference. The writing has never been a terribly strenuous activity for me, and that helps a lot when youre the author of a fair amount of books.

　　James Patterson:

　　Thats right. And the subject in this one is the persistence of the ideological lie. For those who even know what that is, thats normally something we associate with communism, something in the past. So maybe explain what the ideological lie as a concept is and what it has to do with the present.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　Yeah. One of the points I make in the book, and Ive made quite emphatically, I think since the 1990s, is we never really learned the fundamental lessons to be learned from the ideological tragedies of the last two centuries. So you might think of the period 1789 to 1989, 1991, as an age dominated increasingly by ideological threats to political civilization and the moral inheritance of the civilized world, the Western world. And I think there was a tendency on, first of all, so many intellectuals cheerleaded for these active efforts at moral and civilizational subservience. The first political pilgrim was Tom Paine. Now, Tom Paine wasnt a complete crazy by any means, but he suffered from a syndrome, which we would see over two centuries, pas dennemis à gauche, no enemies to the left, but he was a decent man. And he goes to France and he ends up in a Jacobin prison because he thought it was an extreme measure to arrest and try and eventually execute the king and the queen and the royal children. He wanted them to come to Pennsylvania to be Republican farmers.

　　So weve always had intellectuals who thought that a more progressive and ideological version of modernity, what Eric Voegelin very suggestively is called modernity without restraint, would fulfill the promise of modernity and modern democracy. But if you look at the mainstream judgments about this ideological assault on civilization, you either had the cheerleaders who wanted democracy to become thoroughgoingly progressive. And as I say early on in the book, that was always linked to what Leo Strauss called the replacement of the perennial distinction between good and evil with the ideological distinction between progress and reaction. In other words, things were good because they were in accord with the logic of history, not because they were intrinsically meritorious or the opposite. All right, so we had these explanations. What was at stake in the age of totalitarianism, collectivism, the planned economy, dictatorship versus democracy. Theres an element of truth in all of that, but all of those explanations are superficial.

　　And so when we come to the revolutions of 1989, the elite consensus was that this was simply the victory of a more efficient market order over a failed planned economy or the victory of human rights over dictatorship. No one or next to no one really got to the core of what the ideological subversion of political civilization was, what thoroughgoing modernity without restraint was. And it meant when I talk about the lie, which is a concept introduced by Solzhenitsyn and others, but very widespread among thinkers in the East, Havel, Benda, even some … Boris Pasternak speaks about it and Dr. Zhivago, something much worse than dictatorship. It was the demand that human beings pretend to live in a surreal world where language had lost meaning, where facts were negated, where the distinctions between truth and falsehood and fact and fiction were essentially eliminated. And where people spoke, the French called it a langue de bois, a wooden language, the entirety of everyday life became permeated by lies, not lies about this policy or lies about that, but fundamental lies about the nature of reality.

　　So Eric Voegelin, who just happens to be better on totalitarianism than Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss, a contribution to the understanding of totalitarianism and its a good contribution, its a interpretation of a dialogue by Xenophon, the Hiero. Well, thats a very indirect way of approaching the ideological lie. Voegelin spoke about the forcible imposition of a second reality on the only human condition we know. And I think that here were closer to the insights of Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism of Orwell in 1984. Of course, the great fear all these guys had was that, in Orwells famous words, that the boot of such despotism could be stamping on a human face—forever. I dont think that was ever a danger. I dont think human nature can be fundamentally conquered once and for all, but it can be distorted, mutilated, suffocated. And I think we underestimated how long it would take for totalitarian regimes and societies to come out, to use Solzhenitsyns phrase from the rubble of totalitarianism.

　　And we also underestimated the, well, long and short of it, what was the dominant, or at least an effort to make sense of the age of ideology and the Wests eventual victory, which had less to do with our virtues and more to do with the intrinsic failures of totalitarianism. The major explanation was Francis Fukuyamas, and it was that—he gave a Hegelian-Marxism interpretation—we were on the winning side of history, and history has now come to an end. And so to quote Alexandre Kojève, the Hegelian-Marxism bureaucrat and philosopher who first theorized the end of history in a Cold War context, The universal homogenous state, the final form of government, the final form of society was liberal democracy. So its kind of an inverted Marxism. Weve arrived at the end of history, but its not Marxist Leninism, its liberal democracy. Now, that was a very troubling and superficial analysis of events, but it showed as smart as Fukuyama was and as smart as philosophically informed as his thesis was, it was just wrong in every respect.

　　James Patterson:

　　So we end up with liberal democracy all the same, and yet we still have the ideological lie, which shows, as you were describing, is that the lie is not tied to a particular enterprise or government or even a particular people or culture, rather its almost like a temptation, and it seems to be an elite temptation to dominate with language. How does this emerge in Western liberal democracies after were supposed to have learned the lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the Berlin Wall?

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　I think our political and philosophical discourse is very confused, and I think its confused in part because we continue to use words like liberalism and liberal democracy to describe a intellectual, political, cultural order that has remarkably self-radicalized over the last 10 to 50, 60 years. Im an unrepentant defender, an advocate of liberal democracy, but not liberalism as redefined by progressives. And I think this is what all of us underestimated, the remarkable capacity and propensity of even a liberal order to self-radicalize, and that means to adopt many of the tenets and traits and assumptions and presuppositions of the totalitarian enemy. Ive already mentioned the growing replacement, the displacement of the perennial distinction between good and evil, with the ideological distinction between progress and reaction. Youve entered a different moral and perhaps political universe when a liberal order is accompanied informed by that kind of … Democracies, as Pierre Manent said over and over again, Do you really have a representative regime or a liberal regime when democracy is redefined, not to mean the self-government of a free or republican people, but the non-negotiable adherence to ever more extreme understandings of human autonomy?

　　The paradox of late decayed, late liberalism might be revealed in one of the mottos. The French soixante-huitards, the paradox of the new left in an extreme form in France where the Fifth Republic was almost toppled, was you had people on the one hand expressing political fealty not to the Soviet Union, which seemed boring and bureaucratic, one can’t get excited about Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet General Secretary. So your attention was directed toward Caribbean communism, Castro, or the beautiful cultural revolution and then China. So you had these radical students, they were spoiled 21, 22-year-old bourgeois kids, privileged from with the best upbringing, privilege, with the best upbringings in the world and freedom and free state educations, screaming and yelling about the need to bring Maoism and Castroism to France. And yet, what was their motto as they were behind the barricades and they were trying to destroy the liberal university? As Raymond Aron pointed out at the time, “It is forbidden to forbid.” So imagine political totalitarianism, with this extreme cultural and moral antinomianism, and anything goes, and if you are in favor of maintaining an element of authority, not authoritarianism, but an element of authority, in the army, in the universities, in the churches, in the polity, youre an enemy of democracy.

　　I think thats been the broad direction of the West … 1968 in France was an extreme version of it. I think 2020 in the United States was an extreme version of it, when you had upper middle-class people marching in the streets in support not of the dignity of Black Americans, which is a noble cause, but in favor of a movement and a slogan dedicated to the proposition that America was an irredeemably racist nation, that the police shot 15,000 people of color a year, that the police needed to be disbanded, which really means that the innocents and vulnerable people in the inner cities and all that are left at the ravages of gangs and criminals, et cetera. And this is not a new phenomenon, as I show in the book, the Russian intelligentsia, educated society in Russia, between 1860 and 1917 succumbed to this kind of madness. So yes, its an old problem, but it has resurfaced with particular virulence in recent years.

　　And let me just add the final piece of the puzzle, and that is ideological Manichaeism. And what do I mean by that? It seems to me moderate liberalism, conservatism, biblical religion, classical political philosophy, all have in common, despite many theoretical differences, the view that human beings are imperfect, that wickedness cannot be expunged from the human condition, but only restricted within individuals and societies, that freedom needs to be accompanied by moral responsibility and self-limitation. And when that understanding comes under assault, beginning with the Jacobins in the French Revolution, continued by the Marxists, continued by various … In the twentieth century, we had these strange melanges, these mixtures of Freudian sexual emancipation with Marxist terrorism, with liberationist ideology. But it was always we know who the evil people are, and theyre evil less because of what theyve done than because of who they are. And if you change the social system, if you get rid of those groups, classes or races … The Nazis, of course, had the obsession with the Jews and had an essentially racialist ideology. But leftist totalitarianism has always been an ideological Manichaeism centered around suspect classes or social categories.

　　But I think what happened is after 1990, 91, because we didnt have a sufficiently vigorous analysis of what this age of ideology was about, there was never any challenge to either the facile distinction between progress or reaction and its accompaniment, the ideological Manichaeism that saw guilt in certain groups of people simply because of who they were, they were ontologically guilty. People like Shelby Steele, in the late 80s and early 90s, saying, this will only increase, in the form of American racialism, itll only lead to a backlash where were faced with real racism. If you tell young white men for 30, 40 years that theyre ontologically guilty and the source of all evil in the world, some of them are going to fight back in very unsavory ways without the dignity and restraint, lets say, of the religious believers.

　　So yeah, I think all those elements are there, but I think we have to go back to one of my opening remarks, that the utter and complete failure to really understand the totalitarian tragedy allowed ideological Manichaeism to resurge and to radicalize in ways that were perhaps as dangerous as the original forms of totalitarianism. And the disease was a disease within civil society. Weve been very used to looking at totalitarianism in the state, oppressing civil society. But what happens when the totalitarian impulse comes to dominate so many institutions within civil society, like universities?

　　James Patterson:

　　Yeah. The problem really seems to surface in a conflation of issues that you mentioned, where we start with a principle of great moral importance, like racial justice, the establishment of due process and equal protection for Black Americans, which they had not had for a very long time under issues like Jim Crow, and conflating that to a very radical proposition about the 1619 Project. And the 1619 Project itself is tied up in this elite civil discourse, started in universities, and the worst part is that the 1619 Project forecloses the possibility of reaching this very important moral outcome, almost dooms the whole project of racial reconciliation and racial justice by condemning the country. What on Earth?

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　And condemning the dream. Remember, Coats writing his book denouncing the dream? And the dream, of course, is what Martin Luther King had articulated in his speech on them all in 1963, living up to the promissory notes of the Constitution and Declaration. That became the enemy, the idea that the American proposition was in any way choice-worthy or noble or realizable.

　　James Patterson:

　　What drives people to embrace the lie when it seems like its such a vile thing to embrace? It seems very hard for me to imagine that one would want to believe that King is wrong about the dream, or that the Constitution and Declaration are bad. What is it that makes elite liberal democratic people want to believe something so bad?

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　I think we should never underestimate the pleasures of self-loathing. Come fix your eye upon me, I thirst for accusation, I quote that from a 1925 poem by William Butler Yeats. And this has many manifestations. Youve already mentioned the 1619 Project and the pleasure a large part of the intellectual class exhibits in believing and proclaiming that the United States is nothing but an irredeemably racist and oppressive and exploitative society. I also deal with it in my account of this really ubiquitous and mad settler colonial or post-colonial cult, which is so influential in the intellectual community in the universities, of course. As I was finishing up the book, I saw that Taylor Swift was giving a concert and … You didnt think Id mentioned Taylor Swift in this interview.

　　James Patterson:

　　No, that is definitely not on the bingo card.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　Taylor Swift was doing a concert outside Toronto, and she just ritualistically apologized for being on occupied land, et cetera. Well, if she was on occupied land and thought it was a massive injustice, she shouldnt be doing a concert there.

　　James Patterson:

　　Thats right.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　But the moral preening and the lack of historical perspective, the transformation of all original peoples, who of course probably viciously replaced another people, thats how, unfortunately, the world often works. But yes, theres a view that is inculcated into the young in elementary schools and high schools, that is deepened in a ritualistically ideological way at the college or university level, that tells people that the freest, most prosperous and self-critical countries and civilization in the world is the most irredeemably evil. And I cannot help but think that theres a certain perverse pleasure in people knowing, we hold the monopoly on evil in the world and we are part of this small intellectual elite that recognizes this. I would also not underestimate the role of cheap grace.

　　All the moral preening of the intellectual class is, in a way, a plea to make an exception of them. In other words, woke, white progressive intellectuals are supposed to get a pass. They, of course, occasionally have to engage in these ritualistic moments of self-criticism, public browbeating. We see this more and more with mainstream publishing. But in a way, theyre hoping that they will be exempted from cancel culture. And I dont believe, by the way, that wokeness or cancel culture has gone away. I think its being contested, being very strongly, maybe not always wisely, but very strongly contested by the present administration, and its being contested increasingly by people that were fighting back. That wasnt so much the case, lets say, in 2020. But yeah, I think theres all that going on.

　　In other words, I think we have to recur to one of the categories that was very influential during the Cold War, when anti-totalitarian thinkers and intellectuals tried to make sense of why so many people in the intellectual class were attracted to political and ideological movements that destroyed intellectual freedom, the so-called captive mind that Czesław Miłosz spoke about in his famous book from 1953. I think there are strange pleasures associated with the self-enslavement of the mind. Why, for example, would Black progressives and white, woke intellectuals be so attracted to a position that says to Black Americans and other minorities, so-called people of color, that you have no agency whatsoever?

　　If you read the 1619 Project closely, the book, which I treat in a chapter of The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, its authors say over and over again that nothing can ever change in America, and nothing has ever changed in America, because people have no freedom. They not only dont have political freedom or civil rights, they have no metaphysical freedom, they have no free will. And somehow telling people of color that youre playthings of an evil system, and that will never, ever, ever change, its demeaning, it encourages deep-seated nihilism. And thats part of it, I guess, this strange mixture of a distant call to emancipation and revolution, with a hopelessness and a nihilism that the existing order is beyond redemption. Most people look up and say, This isnt the world Im living in.

　　But yeah, you ask a really wonderful question, which is its hard to unpack the deep human motives that would lead very intelligent people to adopt an ideology that denies the freedom of mind and that denies any attachment to a decent political order. I do think the law, political order. So I do think the lie has its attractions, but I think we shouldnt underestimate the capacity of intellectuals towards self-destructive thinking. And theres a difference between an intellectual, by the way, and a real philosopher, a political philosopher. Theyre caught up by the winds. Theyre caught up … Again, I go back to Voegelin. Theres spiritual, we called it pneumapathology. Theres spiritual illness here. Im not talking about mental illness. Im not talking about people repeating what the communists did and putting political opponents in psychiatric institutes, but Im talking about sickness of soul.

　　James Patterson:

　　Yeah.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　And some people seem to admire, this is particularly true of the Nazi or fascist right, but I think its also true with those who indulge communist movements. Theres a strange admiration for violence, for the joy of the knife, as Nietzsche put it.

　　And by the way, I think American conservatives have to get over the habit of just saying, Oh, this is liberalism. None of this stuff is really … Decayed liberalism is a very important part of the story, but weve left liberalism behind. These are post-liberal and anti-liberal currents, deeply destructive of liberal democracy rightly understood. But liberalism is part of the story because liberals havent been very, they havent been admirable or energetic in defending authentic liberty against these nihilistic challenges. So anyway, we could go on and on on this particular topic.

　　James Patterson:

　　All right.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　But I will show minimal self-limitation.

　　James Patterson:

　　Thats right. Well, the word that you use towards the end of the book that I think is a word that does not get enough play. I know Aurelian Craiutu has written on this subject, but thats the subject of moderation. This is a virtue that gets little play today. And I think its at the heart of a lot of the problems you were just describing, where theres this immoderate tendency among politics; but starting with this kind of revolutionary cause on the left that wishes to impose this second reality and then this provocation of a post-liberal or an illiberal right that seeks to almost sort of nihilistically inhibits that project. There seems to be nothing creative. There seems to be nothing genuinely good. And that starts with this desire to do harm, but also it shows a lack of moderation about ones ideas about what politics can even do.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　Yeah, I think thats right. Mostly the post-liberal, anti-liberal tendencies on the right youve just spoke about are mainly, I dont want to say its a marginalized phenomenon in America, but its often an internet phenomenon.

　　James Patterson:

　　Yeah. Definitely.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　So I dont think its taken the form of a, clearly theres some people in MAGA who are on the edge of this stuff, but mainly people like you and I pay more attention to these movements because we find them intellectually troubling, even if theyre not household currents or household names. Yeah, part of the problem about, and moderation is a fundamental political virtue, one different disagreement I have with Aurelian Craiuto, you may have seen I wrote a review essay on moderation and conservatism for the fall issue, fall 2024 issue of Modern Age. And I reviewed very sympathetically Aurelians recent book, A Letter to Young Moderates.

　　James Patterson:

　　Its almost like I planned this question.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　And John Kekes, the Hungarian Émigré, well, must be close to 90 now, very intelligent, analytic political philosopher wrote a book in defense of moderate conservatism. I do take Aurelian to task a bit in my review because I think he has a tendency to confuse moderation with geographical centrism. I think the spectrum has moved so far that things that are highly questionable from the point of view of authentic moderation have become part and parcel of what moderates consider to be moderation, lets say abortion on-demand or lets say a fundamental change to the nature of marriage. Marriage, when you separate marriage from any link to human nature, thats a revolutionary act. Youre not expanding marriage to people whove been left out. Youre redefining marriage as simply a contract with no basis in human nature. Thats hardly moderate.

　　Now, we could debate it and disagree about it or whatever, but there are many other examples like that. Most soi-disant moderates today consider abortion on-demand to be an accomplishment of late liberal society. Many people who call themselves moderates or very hesitant to challenge trans ideology and stuff like that. These are radical, radical innovations. And then, 73 genders, boy, thats a long way from God created the male and female or the so-called sexual binary.

　　So I mention all of this, and a lot of soi-disant moderates are very good at pointing out the threats of autocracy or some of the dangers with populism. I think they generally tend to see more overt hostility to political democracy in most populist movements that are there. But theres a very heightened awareness of right-wing populism or authoritarianism, but are a little tepid in standing up to wokeness. In other words, a certain kind of moderation can go hand in hand with, I dont want to say aggressive pas dennemis à gauche, but with a sort of moderate version of that. You know?

　　James Patterson:

　　Yeah.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　So I am a partisan of moderation as one of the four cardinal virtues and essential to decent politics. But I am also reminded Burke in the 1790s when fighting certain British liberals who were blind to the menace of Jacobinism said, We dont need a full, and all Burke did was talk about moderation as a dire political career and prudence. But he said, Dont confuse it with a false reptile prudence, a kind of prudence that is so prudent that it doesnt see whats before. And again, theres room for reasonable disagreement on whats the most pressing threat at the present moment and all of that. But I do warn in principle that moderation should not mean a slightly slower accommodation to what is perceived as inevitable.

　　James Patterson:

　　Theres that, our preoccupation with post-liberal illiberal currents in the right actually draws a lot of its energy from that process of a conservative saying, Well, Im against left issue X. And then, theres the conservative case for left issue X, and then theres beyond the left issue X wars. Right?

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　Yeah.

　　James Patterson:

　　And so, its that, I will put up no fight, and when I lose, I will accept the terms of the opponent.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　And thats why a lot of populists have turned against so-called liberalism in a virulent way because they associate it with a lack of principle and a lack of spirit. And theyre not altogether wrong. But on the other hand, I think you and I in our different ways were quite alarmed by the willingness of some people who we were close to or close to at one point, or still remain close to, who just were willing to throw out, to proclaim with a certain alacrity the Founding has failed, or liberalism to core has failed. I think, and Ive always thought that part of what were defending, what we conservatives are defending, is liberalism.

　　I agree with Sir Roger Scruton, who was a major influence on my own thinking and writing, that one thing conservatism does is it saves liberalism from itself. In other words, there are many liberal goods, but the liberals dont know how to defend them for many of the reasons that weve talked about today.

　　And so, I dont reduce conservatism to liberalism. I think that would be folly. And I dont reduce the American Republic to liberalism, even though theres powerful liberal elements. But any viable conservatism in the modern world, truly anti-ideological, anti-totalitarian, will be a liberal conservatism. It will safeguard whats best in liberal civilization without giving into the ideological temptation.

　　One reason I subtitled my book The Totalitarian Impulse, I do think the rhetoric of a totalitarian temptation is a meaningful and necessary one. But I dont want to fall into the trap of saying, Were living in a totalitarian country. Were not.

　　James Patterson:

　　Right.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　But the totalitarian impulse is alive and well. Those are two different statements and two different recognitions.

　　James Patterson:

　　So you earlier mentioned that you dont think this totalitarian impulse and things like wokeness or other terms like that, especially after the new administration took over, its really on the decline so much as its almost maybe like retrenching. And so, what is it that you see is necessary in order to constantly keep it at bay or even further push it back? What is it maybe about the present reforms to government or what have you that have seen maybe its decline, at least in the short term?

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　Look, I know people can disagree with this, like lets say how one judges or approaches something like DOGE. But I do think its been an American form of glasnost to know some of the stuff that, lets say, I think a once very useful and admirable institution like USAID was funding. There was a lot of stuff that was highly questionable, that was promoting an extremely progressivist view of democracy and of human nature and of sexuality, and doing so globally in an aggressive way. And I do think the federal government, at least for a time, this is all … Executive orders can be reversed by other executive orders we have to remember. But yes, I have always thought of wokeness and the totalitarian impulse in late modern societies as a phenomena that primarily exists within a self-enslaving civil society. But I think under the last administrations, it had some help from the federal government.

　　So to break that nexus is an important development, but I think its also the case that woke modes of thinking and acting are deeply ingrained in higher education, deeply ingrained in the intellectual community, deeply ingrained in the entertainment community, deeply ingrained in parts of social media. And theyre not going away. These modes of thinking are not going away.

　　In November of 2024, if you read the center right media, there was a ton of foolish stuff written like, Woke is over, its all over. Its all collapsed. And Im thinking to myself, Whats changed? An election. And elections make a difference, but I think there was a certain giddiness in elements of the right that, and I think maybe that giddiness is linked to the fact they dont know the intellectual and academic worlds like we do.

　　James Patterson:

　　Thats right.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　These were people who were very slow. I went to a Roman Catholic, a Jesuit college between 78 and 82, where the chaplain was writing pay-ons to Maoist China and saying the kingdom of God was alive in Cuba. When Alger Hiss came to my college campus in 1979 or 1980, I was the only one in an audience of 500 who got up and challenged him, because I had read Witness and I had read Alan Weinstein. Because I had read Witness and I had read Allen Weinstein and Sidney Hook on the case, and I knew how fraudulent his was. But this stuffs been going on for a long, long, long time. And Conservatives didnt notice. I mean, there was some talk about PC, there was some … But why didnt they notice? Because they were too economistic. They confused winning elections with winning the culture. They were blind. They were anti-intellectual to some extent. And how many times did we hear the mantra, Well, theyll graduate and go into the real world?

　　James Patterson:

　　Oh my goodness. Yeah.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　Well, in the summer of 2020, the New York Times newsroom was the real world. These people who had graduated with highly tendentious ideologized educations, Americas the root of all evil, Western civilization is intrinsically guilty, some narrative about colonialism being the equivalent of the Holocaust, an antinomian sexual morality, a deep and growing distrust for freedom of speech. Biggest change in my lifetime as a professor and writer has been the collapse of the American consensus in favor of free speech. We used to argue about pornography or maybe out now totalitarian organizations in the 50s, whether they had a right to exist, but about political speech there was a real consensus in this country, and that is gone. I would say the other consensus that has broken is a consensus in favor of Zionism in the state of Israel. But thats broken on the left and in a few quarters of the internet right.

　　But anyway, Americans on the center-right were very slow. I mean, David Ackman cuts off his money for the University of Pennsylvania, but this stuff had been going on at Penn for 40 years. I think it was five, seven years ago I remember seeing a story. There was this big ritualistic event to the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. They all got together and they put a towel over a portrait of William Shakespeare. They made him a nonperson. Shakespeare would be at the center of any … No wonder no one majors in English anymore.

　　People who want to read real books, want to learn about the human condition, they want self-knowledge. They want to learn the richness that literature has to offer the soul. Theyre not there to hear the same speech about settler colonialism day after day. And so they walk with their feet and notice the lefties and the POMOs blame it on the market. Well, it is the market. These people are voting with their feet and their bucks, but they wouldnt be voting that way if the humanities departments actually talked in a serious way, in an inviting way about the great and enduring and permanent questions.

　　James Patterson:

　　That is one of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with this as a cultural phenomenon, where a lot of people who are conservatives that have supported traditional universities, especially elite universities, maybe theyve pulled their money from those universities, but where did they put it? And they could be funding more traditional curriculum at other universities or starting centers that do that kind of university work. And instead, there seems to be this kind of, Well, the market will sort this out, as you said, this kind of economists view. And what this underestimates, and I think weve seen this with a lot of the exposure of the grant money that goes to places like Columbia, is that theres a very large amount of money that subsidizes the bad behavior in these departments that theyre not going to be able to influence just by pulling their own money.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　No, I think in this sense, the alum are critical of the movement toward intellectual authoritarianism and wokeness in universities, they have to think much more creatively. In many cases, they have to make breaks with the universities for whom they … Look, everyone has an attachment to the friends and deeds and misdeeds they did between 18 and 22. Its a formative part of life. You dont want to remember-

　　James Patterson:

　　No comment.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　You dont want to remember all the drunken evenings and misdeeds. But to sort of say, Look, thats not all that important now given whats happening in the country, that there are promising institutions and initiatives that are going to do a much better job of promoting and supporting and sustaining the things I care about, I think thats going to take some education. Way back in the 70s and eighties with groups like IEA … Irving Kristol tried to do that, advising conservative-minded philanthropists where to spend their money and not wasted it on institutions that were no longer committed to their founding purposes. And I think more of that is happening, but its still a little too ad hoc. James, let me just add one more thing so we dont leave it out of the conversation.

　　One thing I do talk about in the book, and that has fascinated me in recent years is the resurgence of positive interest in evaluations of communist regimes among the young and among scholars too. I think most of us thought by the mid-90s that the allure of communism had been buried, but not really. I mean, there are many young people who dont know anything resembling the fundamental facts about communist totalitarianism of the twentieth century. And its really frightening. A friend of mine who is much more technologically capable than me showed me these Reddit pages that are dedicated … Mainly twenty-somethings, praising North Korea. Everything that the West says about North Korea is propaganda. North Korea is a progressive society. The Kims havent killed anyone. Its a society dedicated to social justice, fighting American imperialism.

　　How many years did we hear about the beautiful medical system in Cuba? The electric grid has collapsed in Cuba. Those hospitals were always prestige projects in Havana for the foreign visitors and the party elite. 93% of Cubans live in abject poverty. A million Cubans have left in the last year and a half on top of the millions who had left before. I had a student at Assumption University before I retired who when reading about the persecution of religion in totalitarian society said, I didnt know communism was hostile to Christianity.

　　And these might sound like anecdotes, but in the academic literature, theres a growing tendency to normalize Lenin and Stalin and Mao in a way one would never normalize Hitler. So that is deeply concerning. I say somewhere in the book that I used to hear from students, Communism was good in theory, but bad in practice. And now I hear from them, Its good in theory and not so bad in practice. My little chapter on Marx where I say, Good in theory … Second part of the Communist Manifesto, the four abolitions, property, family, religion, and the nation, is that a good theory? Is that based on a real knowledge of the workings of human nature? And add to that Marx saying, I will address no questions. I will refuse to respond to any objections to communism made in the name of religion, philosophy, or natural justice, that gets to the heart of the ideological lie.

　　The Socratic questions, the natural interrogation, the what-is questions, What is justice? Whats the good? have to be shut down. And yet, we have intellectuals and young people telling us this is some kind of admirable ideal. And by the way, we do have a few nuts on the right who think Nazism wasnt so bad. And you remember when Ross Douthat said some years ago to some New York Times readers, You go at the religious right. Wait till you face a really pagan or atheistic right.

　　James Patterson:

　　Yeah. We faced it before and it wasnt very good.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　As we like to say, it wasnt pretty.

　　James Patterson:

　　No. No, it wasnt. And theres something sort of terrifying about the prospect of the kind of rehabilitation of communist regimes that invites that same kind of rehabilitation of fascists and Nazi ideas where, Well, if were going to engage in intellectual malpractice on the left, well, why dont we do the same? Because its working for them. And theres this kind of arms race to extremes and damn the facts.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　At the end of the book when I have this final word to the left, right, and center, and kind of warn about some of the pagan temptations in the new right, I say about opposing the totalitarian impulse, Resist, but do not emulate. Now, of course, when one fights one sometimes has to use neutral weapons, but emulation means adopting … This cult of Carl Schmitt, for example, making enmity the fundamental truth of the human condition. No, no. I mean, to fight the totalitarian foes of civilization is not to establish a political order where struggle or enmity is the moral basis of civic and political life. Quite to the contrary.

　　James Patterson:

　　The book is the Persistence of the Ideological Lie, The Totalitarian Impulse then and now, the author, the one and only, Daniel J. Mahoney. Dr. Mahoney, thank you for appearing on the Law Liberty podcast.

　　Daniel J. Mahoney:

　　Well, great fun, James.

　　James Patterson:

　　Thanks for listening to this episode of Law Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.