There is a sickness inside our hearts. It aches for something brighter, better, a more resplendent mode of being. God, perhaps. Or temporary deliverance from the pain of being alive, and of knowing we will die. It urges us to create something: family; home; work; and art. To contribute something good and useful to future generations. But it also impels us to assert ourselves here and now, to compete for power over others. Pleased allow me to introduce myself … Because it feels good to have power—telling people what to do, getting things done. The boss sets the agenda, defines progress as he sees fit, or how he’s told to see fit. When the boss encounters obstacles or impediments to progress – either within himself or externally – power can make the impediments vanish. I’m a man of wealth and taste … Totalitarians, especially, excel at removing impediments to progress, however defined.
During the French Revolution, the Jacobins employed the guillotine as part of a public spectacle of murder. They executed some 17,000 people deemed enemies of the revolution. I’ve been around for a long, long year … During Argentina’s Dirty War, the military junta used kidnap and arrest to “disappear” some 30,000 people identified as enemies of the regime. Hitler destroyed millions of enemies across Europe through overwork, torture, execution, shooting, and starvation, and instituted an organizational program designed to exterminate Jews. Stalin contributed the Gulag, a system of forced labor camps that housed both ordinary criminals and political prisoners. Stole many a man’s soul and faith …
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the Gulag as a political prisoner, was our greatest witness to the basic human sickness that constitutes the totalitarian temptation, and his life and work continue to inspire scholar Daniel J. Mahoney. In the new book The Persistence of the Ideological Lie (Encounter, 2025), Mahoney examines the totalitarian impulse then and now, how modern revolutionaries replaced the commonsense distinction between good and evil with “progress and reaction,” how people commit evil acts in the name of justice. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
What is the “totalitarian impulse?”
At the heart of this “impulse,” as I call it, is the desire to destroy the primordial commonsense distinction between good and evil. It’s a lie, of course. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.” That remains the truth of the matter.
But instead of recognizing the evil inside of every human heart, the “totalitarian impulse” localizes evil in certain suspect groups that are said to be ontologically guilty, guilty for who they are and not what they have done. So instead of individual responsibility, you have group guilt. It’s what twentieth century Communists did to justify the repression of Christians and the bourgeoise. It’s what the Nazis did so murderously with the Jews. It’s what’s been happening with a race-class-gender regime that profoundly distorts our appreciation of personal responsibility. In this new woke dispensation, you know exactly who the victims are; you know exactly who the oppressors are. The French Enlightenment first introduced this mendacious distinction between “progress and reaction” and it culminated in bloodletting in the form of Jacobin terror. But the Communists perfected it in the twentieth century with an unprecedented form of totalitarianism. Once they label you reactionary, you’re more than a political opponent—you’re a pernicious “enemy” getting in the way of the unfolding of history and the march of progress.
People are finding the courage nowadays to confront the “impulse,” to stand up to it. But the impulse is deeply ingrained in civil society. Old-fashioned liberals and conservatives always looked for despotism or totalitarianism in a centralized, self-aggrandizing state like the Soviet Union. But what happens when this tyrannical impulse has taken refuge in journalism, education, nonprofits, and in other segments of society? What happens when these groups start imposing despotism in the name of anti-racism, anti-slavery, anti-colonialism? In the freest society on earth, this impulse is deeply instantiated in our institutions. If this mentality wins, we end up with nihilism, contempt for patriotism, and contempt for customary morality.
So, modern revolutionaries tell the “ideological lie” about good and evil. If you believe the lie, then you might find yourself living in a “second reality,” one that removes you from contact with the natural world ...
Yes, the “totalitarian impulse” is about replacing the commonsense world with a new grid that has a superficial coherence but distorts reality and estranges us from ordinary experience and common sense. Over the past several years, what particularly disturbed me was that more decent and moderate folk who would never think of themselves as enemies of freedom began to buy into concepts that were incompatible with civilized life. Systemic racism caught on with people. Systemic oppression, too.
The political philosopher Eric Voegelin used the image of a “second reality” to describe the phenomenon. Totalitarians, he suggested, invent their own distorting language. Think of “intersectionality” and the now omnipresent discourse of “power” and “oppression.” People start talking this way and they feel they are sophisticates. But they’re using a language that makes very little reference to reality. Look at “equity.” It’s a fundamental concept of the common law, which is used to address issues of fairness and justice. But this word became a placeholder for “disparity equals oppression.” The new meaning disregards any natural forms of difference that come from a society respecting merit! So, yes, “totalitarian impulse” is tied to destroying the meaning of words.
This conversation relates to the chaos of 2020. Covid. Lockdowns. Riots. Feelings of instability and change. What happened to America in 2020?
We found ourselves in what felt like an ominous cultural revolution. Christopher Rufo has argued that almost everything that became status quo in 2020 – culture of self-loathing, repudiation, etc. – had been marching through the institutions for many years, but it really struck around the time of the death of George Floyd. The country was locked down. Christopher Caldwell has made the argument that the whole country was glued to social media, which was dominated by the youngest, loudest, and most zealous voices. Mitt Romney was marching in the street for Black Lives Matter; a perfectly decent man, of course, but what would lead him into the street to do this, to align with a Maoist organization that preached racial hatred in the name of anti-racism?
There was an atmosphere in 2020, a destructive field of energy that permeated the whole of society. People felt obliged to say and do certain things unworthy of free men and women. American Express was sponsoring seminars for their workers to learn about the evils of speculative capitalism! This was the atmosphere in Russia in 1917. You had the Russian bourgeoisie wearing red carnations and waving red banners. The French have the phrase bien pensant meaning “right thinking.” As the French philosopher and man of letters Charles Péguy suggested over a hundred years ago, never underestimate all the terrible things done by people who are afraid of appearing insufficiently progressive.
The modern Left has absorbed certain beliefs and impulses of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, is that right?
I don’t see any appetite on the Left to return to moderation. Liberalism is dead. The old Democrat party was patriotic and religious, but today’s party is militantly secular, and that’s a thoroughgoing difference. I think a lot of people on the Left felt liberated in 1989 because they didn’t have to justify the Soviet Union. We thought in 1989 that totalitarianism had ended, but we never educated ourselves about the fundamental program: Karl Marx wanted to abolish not only the nation-state, but also the bourgeois family and religion. His project to radically change human nature and build a new society was a palpable failure. The greatest force for murder and destruction in modern times has been politicized atheism. Communism killed up to 120 million people. Some 60-80 million people died from government-induced famines in China and the Soviet Union. It’s a story barely told. Instead of saying “we won” in 1989, we should have explained how these regimes established an unprecedented amount of control over human beings. Because we made no efforts to understand this, the progressive ideology picked up where the totalitarian regime left off.
In your book, you reference thinkers and writers who have spoken truth to power and repudiated the ideological lie. Why do you cite Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky?
Dostoevsky articulated the truth that some people support the destruction of the world—that nihilism is the core of the revolutionary temptation. In his powerful and prescient novel Demons in particular, published in 1872, Dostoevsky showed that the Left is not sentimental about people or about romantic ideals. He dramatized the radical atheism, the zeal for destruction, the taste for violence, and the unrelenting moral nihilism that characterized the emerging revolutionary Left. It was against the grain because in Russia, serious thinkers who didn’t hate God or mock religion were not considered to be intellectuals. Demons is in my view the most prophetic book of the last 100 years.
You also cite Václav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia before he became the first president of the Czech Republic. How did he repudiate the ideological lie?
He came from a bourgeois family in Czechoslovakia. He was self-educated and became a prominent playwright. In the 1970s, he became a dissident, was arrested, and spent hard time in prison. He saw that the regime’s systematic lies were backed up by violence, and that it ground down the people. Even so, he made a commitment to live not by lies, to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn, and wrote forcefully about the Communist regime in The Power and the Powerless, among other works. He and other dissidents founded reading groups, exposed human rights abuses and aimed to create the rudiments of a “parallel polis.” In short, Havel demonstrated that a group of determined people who say “we’ve had enough” can allow genuine moral consciousness to be restored which is a precondition for the restoration of political liberty and human dignity.
Where is the “totalitarian impulse” today, and what can be done to repudiate it?
As I mentioned before, it has colonized large swaths of civil society. Entertainment business. Films. Television. Higher education. The president is making a test case of Harvard, Columbia, Penn. But they don’t teach political history in those institutions—it’s neo-Marxism and “history from below” as well as endless drivel about “settler colonialism.” States under pressure are renaming their DEI departments but they still exist in slightly concealed forms. Some of the new schools for civic thought, like the one at the University of Texas, are very promising. There’s at least an opportunity for pluralism, though many of the churches have gone over to secular progressivism. And, of course, the “totalitarian impulse” doesn’t tolerate free speech.
Solzhenitsyn recognized that you need more than ordinary scholarship to capture the surreal character of the totalitarian world. You need insight. You need art. You need sardonic wit and artful powers of description to make the incomprehensible intelligible. His book The Gulag Archipelago was a self-described “experiment in literary investigation.” It was translated into 30 languages and did more than anything to destroy the moral legitimacy of Communism. Among the great insights of his work was that any system that tries to get rid of evil in toto will only make it magnify in unimaginable ways. We can and ought to restrict evil through the rule of law and through self-restraint. But if we try to get rid of evil, abolish evil, we will only make evil universally triumph by scapegoating the innocent as well as the guilty. Solzhenitsyn is the most powerful, insightful, and eloquent foe of the “totalitarian impulse.” A lot of sophisticates said his work was old-fashioned but sometimes the old verities help us to understand reality best. So I argue, I hope compellingly, in my book.
John J. Waters is author of the postwar novel River City One. Follow him at @JohnJWaters1 on X.
