E-Books →The Persistence of the Ideological Lie The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now

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-belonging to the wrong class or race-rather than for their actions. He shows how the woke, moved by self-loathing and a disdain for our civic inheritance, are transmuting our so-called democracy into a new form of despotism.
Mahoney ultimately argues that our failure to learn from the totalitarian tragedy of the twentieth century allowed the ideological virus to metastasize in new and alarming ways. Above all, he takes aim at the omnipresent "culture of repudiation," as the late Roger Scruton called it, and elucidates multiple paths for overcoming the ideological clichés that continue to deform intellectual and political life today.