We just need to agree on liberalism and we will discover that it is not the cause of all evil.

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In his work on Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher Pierre Manent states that “to truly love democracy, one must love it moderately”. However, once the twentieth-century totalitarian binge has ended, the hybris that afflicts many intellectuals has not disappeared, that is, the presumption of being able to distort reality and remake it from scratch. The Jacobin temptation, in short, persists but is channeled into democratic contexts. The result, however, is that democracy becomes not a way to regulate conflict and ensure the freedom of individuals, but a new God who should straighten out the nature of men. We discuss this with Daniel J. Mahoney , professor emeritus of Political Science at Assumption University, Worcester (Massachusetts), and author of a recent volume, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (Encounter).

Prof. Mahoney, your book is intended to be a defense of a politics that is, I quote from the book, “decent, moderate, non-utopian, and non-ideological.” What characteristics does the ideological lie have today compared to the totalitarian mendacity of the twentieth century? “The ideological lie,” as I call it following Solzhenitsyn, must be understood in continuity with the totalitarian mendacity of the twentieth century. We see at work the same displacement of the perennial distinction between good and evil with the pernicious distinction between “progress and reaction,” the same Manichaeism that considers people guilty for what they are and not for what they have done, the same propensity to replace linguistic clarity with tyrannical and obscuring ideological clichés, and the same attachment to modernity in its less sober and contained forms (what the political philosopher Eric Voegelin suggestively called “modernity without brakes” in his classic 1951 work The New Science of Politics). “Progressive democracy” obscures the eternal conflict between good and evil in the human soul and blames relatively decent and free Western societies for being the source of unprecedented forms of domination and exploitation. Its obsession with race and racism undermines the community of a free society, and its preoccupation with a plethora of nonexistent “genders” is a form of what Edmund Burke called “metaphysical madness.” There is a direct connection between the ideological lie and the totalitarian impulse, if not totalitarianism on a grand scale. My book is intended to provide a defense of political reason, classically understood, and a call to genuine liberals and conservatives to defend genuine moderation (the opposite of ideological lying) thoughtfully and courageously. Fake moderates who lazily yield to ideological categories and ways of thinking are not moderates at all.”

Orphans of God without God, many intellectuals have been searching for absolutes in the world of men for some time now. One of these is now democracy: is it the new opium of intellectuals? “Too many intellectuals and activists,” says Mahoney, “today associate democracy with progressive therapies that have nothing to do with the self-government of a free people or with respect for the civic heritage bequeathed to us by our noble, if imperfect, ancestors. Moral indignation, self-loathing, and contempt for the ‘old religion and the old nation,’ as Pierre Manent put it, define a new and corrosive secular ‘democratic’ religion. When moderate parties and governments capitulate to these ways of thinking, frustrated citizens turn to populist political groups that are falsely deemed ‘far right’ and ‘antidemocratic.’ Too many European and American progressives are busy ‘saving democracy’ by stifling it.”

How do we cope with the renewed ideological-totalitarian virus? How do we revitalize the moral realism that the West seems to have lost? “As I suggest in the book’s conclusion, those of us who are committed to the old truths and to what Tocqueville rightly called ‘freedom under God and law,’ must intelligently and forcefully resist the ideological-totalitarian virus without emulating it. We do not need a counter-Manicheism of our own. Instead, we must lead a civilized life and work to reinvigorate a genuine liberal and civic education. We must also resist every attempt to stifle the human soul and to settle for moral indifference and atheistic complacency. This is a difficult task, to be sure, but it is the only true path for the friends of freedom and human dignity.”

The current trend is to see liberalism as the root of all evil. Commenting on the latest work of the “post-liberal” conservative Patrick J. Deneen, “Regime Change,” you spoke of a “missed opportunity.” Why? “The twentieth century witnessed the rise of a degenerate liberalism that had no conception of ‘enemies on the left’ and confused freedom with civic indifference and moral subjectivism. If liberalism means antinomianism, superficial relativism, and ingratitude for our inherited and God-given gifts, then that liberalism must be firmly rejected. But if liberalism means constitutionalism, the rule of law, religious liberty, and respect for free thought and fundamental liberties, then it is part of our heritage that we are obligated to guard and preserve. I am therefore a liberal conservative, a friend of a liberalism (rightly understood) that appreciates an older wisdom that helps elevate and sustain it. Patrick Deneen, for all his insights, does not sufficiently honor these crucial distinctions. And he mistakenly identifies the American founding with selfishness, atomistic individualism, and a total denial of human virtue and the human soul.”

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