Daniel DiSalvo writes for City Journal about insightful intellectual scholarship that informs current political debates.
Over the last decade, business leaders, university administrators, and government officials across the United States increasingly found themselves navigating ideological conflicts that would have seemed fantastical a generation ago.
Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Persistence of the Ideological Lie offers a scholarly roadmap through this terrain by drawing an audacious parallel: the “woke” progressivism so prevalent in American institutions recently shares troubling affinities with the totalitarian movements that devastated the twentieth century. While the punishments for disobedience may not have been as severe—cancellations rather than gulags—the underlying structure of thinking, Mahoney argues, often follows a disturbingly familiar pattern.
A professor emeritus at Assumption University, Claremont Institute fellow, and distinguished scholar of European political thought, Mahoney argues that what began as academic theories of identity politics in the 1980s and multiculturalism in the 1990s escaped the ivory tower and evolved into something more menacing: a rigid, moralistic worldview that divides society into oppressors and oppressed, with white males and conservatives cast as perpetual villains. Their victims are a cornucopia of ethnic groups, “people of color,” women, sexual minorities, and formerly colonized nations. In recent years, the Black Lives Matter movement, the 1619 Project, and theories of intersectionality and gender identity added some new notes, but the score largely remained the same. This abstract framework, Mahoney contends, mirrors the binary thinking that powered history’s most destructive ideological movements. People are held guilty for who they are rather than what they’ve done.
Mahoney’s broader argument unfolds in three stages. First, he exposes the moral problems with a woke doctrine that locates good and evil in groups rather than individuals. Second, he traces how these premises fuel a revolutionary spirit that embraces “deconstruction” and “civilizational repudiation”— viewing American and Western history as irredeemably tainted by oppression. Finally, he shows how ideological movements invariably target the “moral contents of life”: private property, family, religion, and the nation.
