Daniel Mahoney is with us today, a man well known to our listeners. He had an

emeritus professor at Assumption University. He is also a senior fellow at Claremont Institute. His last book was

The Statesman as Thinker, which we actually covered on the podcast a couple of years ago. He has a

new book out. It is called The Persistence of the Ideological Lie. That's our topic today. Welcome,

Professor Mahoney. Ah, thank you very much, Mark. Great to be here again. In the beginning, you refer to something

called the, quote, ideological project. That's a big term. Give us a broad picture of what the

ideological project is or has been. Yeah, I should begin by saying by ideology, I do not

mean prospectivism. You know, there used to be a book by these couple called Evanstein and our

father and son team. And it was like conservatism, liberalism, socialism, socialism, communism. You know,

these are different. I don't mean that. I mean a self-conscious

project going back, really, one could find its origins or its beginnings in the French Revolution

to radically transform human nature and society. Usually at a stroke, although some of our neo-totelitarians have

been more patient, you know, sort of digging into institutions and correct them from within.

But the lie, much of my inspiration for the idea of the lie comes from Solzhenitsyn, also from

Voslav Havel, some of the anti-totelitarian dissidents who understood ideology in a very

specific sense. And it was something like this. It was, on one level, it's what Eric Voglin

called modernity without restraint.

The desire to propel humanity into a radically new dispensation, a radically new condition, you know, as Mark said, the prehistory of humanity is over.

History is about to begin.

And this meant the simplest way I can put it is the ideological project is premised on the idea that the age or the perennial distinction between truth and falsehood, good and evil, is to be replaced by an ideological

distinction between progress and reaction. And in other words, there's a movement to history,

the traditional, the tried and true, the wisdom of the philosophical and theological

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