Rescuing Souls from the Totalitarian Temptation

Totalitarian ideologies are supposed to be on the ash heap of history. With the apparent triumph of liberalism first in World War II and then in the Cold War, history has allegedly come to an end. And yet discontent simmers just beneath the surface of Western society. Young people increasingly turn to these supposedly discredited ideologies of both the right and the left. So many want to go beyond liberalism and answer their hunger for meaning through power politics. 

Nothing short of conversion will save this generation from ideology’s corrupting influences.

Thus far, very little seems to abate the rise of the new radicalism. New York City’s young voters, for example, elected an avowed socialist as mayor just last fall. On the right, too, large numbers of Conservatism Inc.’s young staffers are adopting increasingly reactionary poses—including noxious anti-Semitism. These trends are, without question, the most troubling in American politics—and they must be stopped. Simply scolding youthful extremists, however, or intoning the old slogans of liberalism will not win over converts to moderation. Nor will technical solutions promising material abundance sate the spiritual longings driving the rise of extremism. In no small measure, totalizing ideology holds such an appeal for the disaffected young because the centrist establishment offers so little by way of a truly moral vision. And, as the Proverb goes, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” 

George Orwell was among the 20th-century intellects who explained why the ideological mode of thinking captivates so many. Throughout his wartime writings, the socialist was very honest about why Nazism came to power in Germany. “Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’” he wrote in a 1940 review of Mein Kampf, “Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.” Totalitarians of the left and right alike tell their impressionable followers they are fighting for more than self-interest; they claim to be fighting for meaning in a meaningless world.

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