I’ve counted them all up: the teacher who laughs with children at their God and at their cradle, is already ours. The lawyer who defends an educated murderer by saying that he’s more developed than his victims and couldn’t help killing to get money, is already ours. Schoolboys who kill a peasant just to see how it feels, are ours. Jurors who acquit criminals right and left, are ours. The prosecutor who trembles in court for fear of being insufficiently liberal is ours, ours. Administrators, writers—oh, a lot of them, an awful lot of them are ours, and they don’t know it themselves!
—Dostoevsky, Demons
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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. Its thesis is simple enough, but it needs the full resources of applied political philosophy to explain with adequate clarity and depth. The thesis? That the “ideological” project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on renewed virulence in the late modern world, just thirty-five years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989.
This was not supposed to happen. Midcentury “progressive democracy,” as the Hungarian moral and political philosopher Aurel Kolnai called it in 1950, had already revealed itself to be an “incomplete totalitarianism” that, nonetheless, was capable, he argued, of rivaling Communism and Nazism by morphing into a “Third Rider of the Apocalypse.” For a long time, Kolnai’s forebodings about a totalitarian turn in democracy seemed exaggerated and not a little overwrought to me. But how prescient this analyst of the utopian mind turned out to be. That Third Rider has indeed come to threaten and repress, as Kolnai feared, all “essential opposition” to Autonomous Man, the human being defined by his desire to emancipate himself from the “alien powers” (as Marx called them) that subjugate Man. Included in these powers are all natural, transcendent, and inherited limits to human will. The totalitarian impulse has thus survived the “official” collapse of the classic totalitarian regimes and ideologies of the twentieth century and has come out strengthened, and less “incomplete,” in decisive respects. For a long time, Kolnai wrote, democracy, no matter how “progressive” its ultimate aspirations, had “contained and sheltered” precious “traditions of civilization and fragments of liberty” that it now jettisons with irresponsible abandon. Its “theory”—increasingly abstract, insatiable, unremitting—has come to triumph over its once salutary “practice.” The endless self-radicalization of democracy predicted by Alexis de Tocqueville nearly two hundred years ago has come to pass with unerring and unnerving accuracy.
For a long time, Kolnai’s forebodings about a totalitarian turn in democracy seemed exaggerated and not a little overwrought to me. But how prescient this analyst of the utopian mind turned out to be.
As a result, the constraints and limits that informed the democracies of old have largely been replaced by contempt for the enduring verities that once guided the exercise of human freedom. As Leo Strauss wrote around the same time in his illuminating 1953 essay “Progress or Return,” the crucial error, the root of the evil, was the replacement of the once-venerable distinction between “good and evil” with the ever-shifting “distinction” between “progress and reaction.” That ever-moving distinction not only distorted our understanding of the human world but could be readily invoked to justify draconian efforts to restrict civilized liberty, ordered liberty, in the name of the “Progress” of humanity and the “democratic idea.” It is no accident (as the Marxists like to say) that Marxist-Leninists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere prided themselves on their commitment to “Progressive Doctrine,” in their view the only genuine meaning of democracy rightly understood. The woke closer to home are self-described “progressives” as well, quick to label those who disagree with them as “reactionaries,” “racists,” and “oppressors,” who must be silenced, shamed, and “canceled” in order to promote a fictive liberation and justice, to bury “racism,” “colonialism,” “sexism,” and “transphobia” once and for all. In today’s salient cultural and political dispensation, university administrators, activists, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) officers crudely replace liberal education and Socratic interrogation with cliché-ridden orthodoxy indistinguishable from indoctrination. To be sure, America remains a largely if only partially free country, though markedly less so than even in the recent past. But the totalitarian impulse lies at the heart of this ascendant ideology of cultural negation and civilizational repudiation, and several segments of civil society, along with progressives in government, are committed to “saving democracy” by suffocating it. We no longer live in a recognizably liberal age as a new authoritarian order imposes itself in the name of an obligatory “anti-authoritarianism.” These troubling paradoxes go unnoticed, alas, by too many friends of liberty and human dignity.
If the American Framers were cautiously hopeful about the capacity of a republican people to govern themselves by “reflection and choice” (in the language of Federalist No. 1), they never confused human beings with angels who could solve the political problem once and for all. Their anthropology, their account of human nature and human motives, was sober, realistic, and devoid of both excessive optimism and debilitating pessimism. Their institutional arrangements drew on Locke and especially Montesquieu and those two thinkers’ new science of power checking power in a modern republic at once representative and commercial. But the language and categories of virtue and vice, of good and evil, of sin and imperfection, still spoke powerfully to their hearts and minds. In them coexisted an admirable moderation formed from classical and Christian sources with a confidence in a sober and constrained version of modern progress. They never for a moment succumbed to what Eric Voegelin has so suggestively called “modernity without restraint,” to utopian dreams and delusions. The political scientist Martin Diamond rightly called the American Revolution that rare sight to behold: “a revolution of sober expectations.”
Like much of my previous writing and scholarship, this book is dedicated to defending decent, moderate, nonutopian, and nonideological politics by exposing the Ideological Lie for what it is. This effort has several components, some critical, some positive. Let me briefly enumerate them with the help of eminent guides: First, modern totalitarianism is revealed as the effectual truth of “modernity without restraint” (Eric Voegelin), the self-enslavement of human beings (Aurel Kolnai) that inexorably flows from jettisoning a sober and serious appreciation of the drama of good and evil within every human soul. As the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argues in The Gulag Archipelago, the greatest anti-totalitarian work ever written, evil is never simply “localized” in certain “oppressive” groups who are said to be its sole carriers and utterly beyond redemption. In truth, “The line dividing good and evil runs through the heart of every human being.” Totalitarian ideologues lack self-knowledge because they refuse to turn the sword inward and fail to recognize their own capacity for what Solzhenitsyn calls “exuberant evil.”
...constraints and limits that informed the democracies of old have largely been replaced by contempt for the enduring verities that once guided the exercise of human freedom.
Second, as the unjustly forgotten political theorist Gerhart Niemeyer argues in his wonderfully insightful 1971 book, Between Nothingness and Paradise, it is the height of unreflective hubris to turn revolution into a “vocation” and to denounce the whole of creation as “sheer inhumanity” and a “gigantic deception.” That insidious path—followed by François-Noël Babeuf and his “conspiracy of equals,” by the Russian revolutionary movement of the nineteenth century, by Marxism in its Leninist, Stalinist, and Maoist forms, and by New Left and Third Worldist intellectuals everywhere—combines nihilism with a debased taste for violence and moral transgression.
Original sin, that moral taint that cannot be eliminated in this fallen sublunar world, does not mean, as Niemeyer puts it, that “all laws are unjust, all consciousness is false, all relations must be corrupt, all institutions appear oppressive.” To say “No” to everything is to succumb to rank ingratitude and nihilistic despair. As Niemeyer perceptively argues, the “total critique of society” at the center of all ideological movements only leads to murderous and coercive politics and to a massive assault on political reason rightly understood. True prophets, the biblical ones, especially such as Isaiah and Amos, attack gross injustice and religious infidelity, while false prophets aim “to destroy the common acceptance of a divine creation and a created human nature.” Political, philosophical, and religious wisdom in the West, before the ideological age, conceived healthy political life “as the order of acting within a cosmos of natures, rather than as a project of making both man and the world.”
In today’s salient cultural and political dispensation, university administrators, activists, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) officers crudely replace liberal education and Socratic interrogation with cliché-ridden orthodoxy indistinguishable from indoctrination.
Third, with the wise English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, this book sees the “deconstruction” and “repudiation” of our Western inheritance not as an “‘empowering’ of the oppressed” but as a dangerous and destructive enterprise that madly invites us to “un-create and re-create the world” ad infinitum. To reduce everything to rapacious “power” is to distort reality beyond recognition, and to drive love and friendship, benign authority, and civic comity from the human world. It is to trample on the Sacred and thus to do the Devil’s work. It is Goethe’s Mephistopheles who is committed to forever negating the givenness of the world, the world as it has been bequeathed to us.
These “heresies,” as Roger Scruton called them, are essential elements or building blocks of the fictive “surreality” or Second Reality that the Ideological Lie presupposes and aims to put in place of the natural order of things. These widely held sophistries and distortions provide the animating core of the totalitarian impulse that is so alluring to intellectuals who have dedicated themselves to the hate-filled “total critique of society.” If they are not all on the revolutionary barricades, they have deliberately and self-consciously corrupted what remains of the humanities and humanistic education. And they indulge tyranny and terror (think Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, or, more recently, Hamas) as morally superior to what remains of prosaic bourgeois democracy.
Read more in The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now
