by John Dale Dunn
The book is an accessible look at the mindset of leftism that drives so much of political discourse in America today.
Daniel J. Mahoney has written several books about 20th-century politics and political figures. His most recent book, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now, focuses tightly on present-day totalitarianism and political tyranny. The book, although short, covers a lot of ground, everything from Racialism and the 1619 Project to wokeism and socialist crit theory to socialist dominance in the academy to leftist support for despots and tyrannies.
The book’s starting point is the racialist mob violence of the past few years, which is built upon a revolutionary framework. Their embrace by America’s institutions, rather than by ordinary Americans, has resulted in conflict and enmity in America and a continuing atmosphere of political polarization. The left’s goal is to destroy American institutions, allow a revolutionary tyranny to rise in their place, one unconstrained by our Judeo-Christian values, fused with Greek moral philosophy.
This is, says Mahoney, a “Great Refusal,” one that entirely rejects goodness and virtue. Under this theory. There is no natural law and no natural order of things—such talk is rejected without debate. There is certainly no received wisdom or anything worthwhile in traditional thinking and mores.
Instead, there is only what the late German American philosopher Eric Voegelin described as an imaginary Second Reality, one that is intemperate and fanatical. Voegelin arrived at his theory by studying the French Revolution, which, despite its high-flown language about “liberty, equality, and brotherhood, revolved around the insane idea of replacing human nature, human behavior, and Biblical-Enlightenment social constructs with a destructive cult that rejects Western Civilization’s foundations and values.
There are common themes found in those individuals who have an impulse to tyranny: self-righteousness, fanaticism, negativity, lack of awareness of human limits, a refusal to recognize truth, the rejection of civil authority, affection for totalitarian government, a dislike of self-government, and an affection for terrorism. Those who desire tyranny are also often angry and lack self-confidence. Mahoney diagnoses in leftists a collection of tormented souls who blame their torment on others.
Part of the problem we face now, writes Mahoney, is that the West never ascertained that, even as communism died in the Eastern Bloc, it never ensured that it hadn’t taken hold in the West. What was then a five-decade-long Gramscian march through the West’s institutions continued unabated.
To understand the Soviet socialism that still infects the West, Mahoney uses Fyodor Dostoevsky, particularly his novel Demons, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as his analytical lenses. Mahoney credits the latter as the source for the idea of the “ideological lie.” Contrary to the left’s sales pitch about the wonders of communism for the human experience, communist totalitarianism is an evil ideology that destroys the most important elements of human existence—private property, the family, religion, and the nation.
Mahoney writes:
Totalitarian ideology negates conscience and dismisses the moral law of which it is a dark reflection as an antiquated justification for class oppression, a tool of the forces of “privilege” and oppression… In this grotesque transvaluation of value, whatever promotes world-transforming revolution is necessary and good, and whatever stands in its way is, by definition, retrograde and evil. The age-old distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is replaced by the morally corrupt distinction between “progress” and “reaction.”
o understand how so many Americans became invested in this revolutionary, anti-constitutional ideology, Mahoney examines the work of the late Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian British polymath philosopher, who wrote about the search for truth. In the context, Polanyi introduced the concept of a “moral inversion” driven by the French Enlightenment’s hatred of religion. The result was the creation of the delusion that humans shall be as gods. This replaced morality and religion with positivism and moral nihilism.
Mahoney’s book gets a lot done in less than 150 pages. He reminds the reader of the importance of the search for the truth and the preservation of liberty for the citizens, while maintaining civic order, all of which are essential for civic order.
Mahoney writes:
This book aims to provide nothing less than a full-throated defense of moral and political sanity against the latest eruptions of ideological mendacity in our time… This book … aims not only to repudiate repudiation and the widespread nihilism of our time but to affirm those enduring verities always worth affirming.”
Well said, well done.
Image: Amazon (fair use).
John Dale Dunn is a physician and attorney in Brownwood, Texas.
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/05/daniel_mahoney_s_new_book_reveals_how_the_pathology_of_leftism_threatens_america.html
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