Shooting Dead Enemies
The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now, by Daniel Mahoney. Encounter Books, April 2025, 168 pages.
Prof. Mahoney’s little book is a shoot-‘em-up in which the bad guys are dispatched as quickly as the author can change magazines. Robespierre, Marx, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, race theorist Derrick Bell, Noam Chomsky, and of course End-of-History promoter Francis Fukuyama. Mahoney racks up a body count that would gratify John Wick. Conservative readers (including this writer) will be gratified by the bodies of the enemies of civilization stacked like cordwood. It’s great fun and a breezy read.
Like most action pics, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie has lots of great moments embedded in a meandering plot. Mahoney expends a great deal of his ammunition on malefactors who have aged out of active mischief. The Marxism taught at American universities has little to do with the accumulation tables in Das Kapital, and even less to do with the defunct Soviet Union. What today’s students are fed today stems from the Frankfurt School’s Frankenstein hybrid of Freud and Marx. Freud — directly or indirectly — is responsible for the toxic notion that authority stems from sexual repression, and that sexual self-expression is the path to liberation.
But Freud goes unmentioned, as do the malevolent spirits of the new radicalism, Sartre and Heidegger, the apostles of Existentialist self-invention. Heidegger never recanted his early and enthusiastic Nazi Party membership, and Sartre groveled for Stalin. Heidegger isn’t mentioned, and Sartre only in passing. Heidegger’s doctoral student Herbert Marcuse convinced a generation of radicals that speech is violence. These malefactors connect the extremes of individual gratification, including the celebration of sexual perversity, with the totalitarian shift of the Left to censorship, witch hunts, and the cancel culture.
This isn’t academic nit-picking. The Right won the war against Communism when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Conductor Leonard Bernstein, the poster boy for Radical Chic in Tom Wolfe’s eponymous book, performed Beethoven’s 9th Symphony before the ruins of the wall months after it fell, a repentant Commie sympathizer celebrating its downfall. But the hedonistic irrationalism of Heidegger and his forebears in the Romantic movement flanked and routed us within a few years after this victory.
That is a gauge of our own inadequacy. Leo Strauss, one of Mahoney’s heroes, fawned over Heidegger, averring, “I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort to find a solid basis for rational liberalism. Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight. But here is the trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.” Sir Roger Scruton for all his rationalist brilliance could not resist the siren-chant of Richard Wagner, the herald of Western civilization’s downfall. Never mind that today’s college students couldn’t decipher a line of Heidegger or recognize a bar of Wagner: They are indoctrinated by their idiot great-grandchildren.
Mahoney cites approvingly the Hungarian philosopher Aurel Kolnai, who warned that “progressive democracy” is an “incomplete totalitarianism” and might become a “Third Rider of the Apocalypse” after Communism and Fascism. Kolnai, though, dug at the deep roots of progressive democracy. He saw in Heidegger and Sartre a form of “doom-consciousness spiced with a high-sounding idealistic demand — or worse: a new version of the aesthete’s surrender to active barbarism, an espousal of totalitarian tyranny as the next best substitute for the impossible pursuit of total freedom.”
Our Marxism is not the Soviet variety excoriated by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — Mahoney’s principal good guy — but rather is a witches’ brew of Freudian flummery, Existentialist self-gratification, and totalitarian political techniques. I refer the reader to my 2022 essay “The Destructive Impact of Cultural Heideggerianism.”
The good guy shoots all the bad guys only in action movies, and it is unfair to expect Mahoney to bag all of them. Still, Mahoney’s emphasis on the Jacobins and Communists of the past is a bit like exhuming a heretic’s body and burning it posthumously at the stake. The West crushed one set of civilization’s enemies, the Soviet Communists, only to encounter equally insidious enemies within its own ranks.
Getting this right is not a matter of academic exactitude. The sad fact is that the Left has prevailed in the culture wars. Except for a few doughty holdouts, it controls higher education and the middlebrow media. Pockets of resistance remain, among conservative Catholics like Mahoney, evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, the West Coast Straussians, and a few others. If our message has been drowned out, perhaps it is because we need a clearer message.
Mahoney cites Hannah Arendt’s magisterial research on totalitarianism, but does not cite her deep insight into the Romantic origins of Heidegger and his emulators. Fascism, Arendt wrote, was Romanticism put into practice. She wrote in a 1944 critique of Heidegger: “The ruthless individualism of Romanticism never meant anything more serious than that ‘everybody is free to create for himself his own ideology.’ What was new in Mussolini’s experiment was the ‘attempt to carry it out with all possible energy. ’… Romanticism provided the most excellent pretext in its unlimited idolization of the ‘personality’ of the individual, whose very arbitrariness became the very proof of genius.”
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt cites as forerunners of fascism the Romantic theorist Friedrich Schlegel and his acolyte Adam Müller, whose 1807 book The Idea of the State became a Nazi textbook. She wrote:
Mueller and Friedrich Schlegel are symptomatic in the highest degree of a general playfulness of modern thought in which almost any opinion can gain ground temporarily. No real thing, no historical event, no political idea was safe from the all-embracing and all-destroying mania by which these first literati could always find new and original opportunities for new and fascinating opinions.
Schlegel and Müller ended their careers in the employ of Prince Metternich, the mastermind of the post-Napoleonic Holy Alliance. Mahoney condemns the Jacobins of the French Revolution and their despicable Terror, and rightly so. But the brand of totalitarianism that confronts us today descends not from Robespierre, but rather from the Romantic agents of the reaction that followed the 1814 Congress of Vienna. Metternich’s police state was the prototype of today’s Deep State. Heidegger, in Arendt’s account, was the successor to the Metternich Romantics, and her insight is sharpened by recent scholarship, for example, Peter Hanly’s study of Heidegger and Novalis.
Consider this: For the first time in history, there is a self-styled Communist country, the People’s Republic of China, that can represent itself as a success. Per capita GDP in constant RMB has grown fifty-fold since 1960, according to the World Bank, and China is now by some measures the world’s largest economy, and in any event the world’s largest manufacturer. One can dispute the accounts of China’s success, but the radicals who abominate Western civilization as a racist-homophobic-misogynist-colonialist monster believe in the China story. Yet there is barely a flutter of sycophancy among today’s Left about China’s political system (unlike the 1960s, when self-styled Maoists teemed on American campuses). The Communist Party of China, to be sure, is Marxist in the same way that the Mafia is Catholic, but the disinterest in Chinese Communism illustrates how moribund the old Marxist project has become.
Prominent among Mahoney’s good guys is Leo Strauss; among his villains are Fukuyama and his model Alexandre Kojève, the French-Russian mentor to a generation of Existentialist leftists and a pioneer of the European supranational state now embodied in the European Union. Sir Roger Scruton observed that Kojève’s lectures in the 1930s “were attended by almost everyone of that generation who was to make a contribution, after the war, to the emerging literary culture of a guilt-ridden France. Sartre, de Beauvoir, Marcel, Lacan, Bachelard, Levinas, Bataille, Aron, Merleau-Ponty — and many more — all attended.” Kojève blended Heidegger with a tendentious reading of Hegel and a bit of Marx into the witch’s potion of post-Modernism.
Neo-conservatism was hatched in the same brood. Fukuyama was dispatched to Paris by his doctoral advisor Allan Bloom (of The Closing of the American Mind), perhaps Leo Strauss’s most celebrated student. Strauss for that matter was Kojève’s lifelong friend; as I reported elsewhere, Kojève’s caricature of Hegel suited Strauss, who portrayed Hegel as a proto-totalitarian toady to the Prussian monarchy. Modern scholarship has refuted this canard so comprehensively that we may assert that the real Hegel is the best antidote to the Left Hegelian toxin. Sir Roger Scruton offered a fine appreciation of the conservative Hegel in The Conservative Mind.
Strauss and Kojève referred to the student notes of Hegel’s lectures published posthumously as The Philosophy of History, but ignored his magnum opus The Philosophy of Right. Rather than the either/or of tradition vs. reason, Hegel argues for both/and: Tradition imbibed from the family is our Dasein, or Being, without which society cannot exist, but the free market of individual endeavor, or civil society, makes possible the flourishing of individual talent. The free market in turn cannot regulate itself, and society requires a State to correct its inevitable imbalances. Russell Kirk and John Courtney Murray are both right, as are Patrick Deneen and Daniel Mahoney.
If, as Strauss averred, there exists a set of immutable natural rights known to Plato and Aristotle and derivable by reason, why indeed should we not expect history to come to an end? Once we understand these natural rights, why should we not be able to teach statecraft to Afghanis and Somalis, as we did to postwar Germans? Leo Strauss died in 1974, the year that Fukuyama graduated from college, and we cannot blame Strauss for the subsequent delusion that America’s political system could be patented and exported. But neither can we easily explain why the notion of natural rights derivable by reason does not lead to this conclusion.
The slave societies of ancient Greece terminated in the demographic collapse of late Hellenism, the first documented self-willed extinction on the historical record. Civilization was saved by Christianity, which embraced the Biblical assertion that man is created in God’s image, such that human rights derive not from a capricious and often hostile nature, but from the Maker of Heaven. Heidegger’s signature idea was Being-unto-Death and his overriding idea is resignation; Biblical religion promises the resurrection of the dead. Despair is the impulse behind the two-faced monster of the cultural Left, arbitrary individual expression that inevitably dissolves into totalitarian collectivism.
Conservatives will not turn the tide in the culture wars if they keep fighting ghosts. It is past time we set our focus on the real intellectual enemy: the army of Heidegger’s offspring alive and well in the West.
I enjoyed Mahoney’s book and recommend it wholeheartedly. But we need to do better.