The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now

This book aims to chronicle the ideological impulse as it has manifested itself since the French Revolution of 1789. Whether in the form of Jacobinism, Marxist-Leninism, National Socialism, Progressive Democracy, the New Left, or the New Woke Dispensation, one witnesses the same impatience with prudent reform and piecemeal change, the same propensity to ideological Manichaeism (people are guilty for who they are--belonging to the wrong class or race--and not what they have done), the same replacement of the age-old distinction between good and evil by the illusory distinction between Progress and Reaction, the same denial of free will and moral agency, and the same desire to to repudiate our civilized patrimony and to negate the very idea of a natural order of things that cannot be engineered out of existence. And, of course, in each manifestation of the Ideological Lie, as the dissidents in the Communist East called it, we witness unrelieved contempt for a self-limiting constitutional order rooted in self-government and the rule of law. In the new Woke Dispensation, self-loathing and limitless contempt for our Western inheritance and American civic tradition are mandatory requirements of commitment to an understanding of "democracy" that is nothing but a "mangled wreck," to cite the memorable words of Abraham Lincoln. The book will also explore the efforts of assorted ideologists and totalitarian fanatics over the last two centuries to create a fictive "Second Reality" to replace the only human condition we know. The books draws on the prophetic and prescient insights of Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Raymond Aron, Eric Voegelin, and Kenneth Minogue to analyze the ideological war on moderation, common sense, and civilized liberty. It traces the appropriation of fundamentally ideological conceptions of race, class, and "gender" to deny common sense and the mutual moral accountability that underlies a liberal order that continues to honor traditional wisdom and good sense. The book also argues that our failure to learn the right lessons from the totalitarian tragedy of the twentieth century (and to energetically pass on those lessons to new generations) allowed the ideological virus to metastasize in new and terrible ways. With gender theory, for example, our new Jacobins war on human nature (and common sense) in a way that did not even cross the minds of revolutionary nihilists in earlier century. The final sections of the book analyze the nature and roots of the omnipresent "culture of repudiation" as the late Roger Scruton called it, and multiple paths for overcoming it and despotism old and new.