Overview
Paths taken, paths rejected: For our Republic, approaching its 250th anniversary, it all could have been very different. Among those things acclaimed political philosopher and scholar Daniel J. Mahoney explores in his new book, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now, are France’s revolutionary roots—contemporaneous with the emerging American nationhood that sprung from our 1776 claim to independence—and their lasting consequences. There was a great pull for the new United States to embrace the French version of “liberty”—whose dots connect to the guillotine. What was it about America’s Founders, who had just broken with a king, that made them reject the anti-royal (and wildly violent) program of Robespierre and others determined to reconstruct the relation between the state and man and God—an ideological depravity that lived on, decades later, in the gulag, in the laogai, and still in DEI? What had America then fallen for the French allure: What would these United States resemble today (realizing that some here have promulgated and implemented its doctrines and techniques)? What role did Washington, the Founding Father (and subject of another Mahoney classic, The Statesman as Thinker), play, in deed and in spirit, to set America on an utterly unique path—one that led to a vibrant civil society, bursting with the emergence of voluntary associations that define what we have come to know as “American exceptionalism”? These and other key questions will be brought out in a discussion—set against the backdrop of commencing Semiquincentennial celebrations of the American Revolution—with Professor Mahoney to understand what our founding was, and wasn’t, and how its uniqueness led to a nation made exceptional through its remarkable civil society.
