To create utopia, Marxists first had to rout Christianity, which they saw as a false religion that sanctified the ruling class and kept the poor superstitious and easy to control. The Russian radicals also hated the so-called Philistines—their word for the deplorable people who live out their daily lives without thinking of anything higher or greater. The radical intelligentsia regarded the Philistines as their complete opposites: the rough and beastly Goliaths to their clever Davids. They hated the Philistines with all-consuming intensity—no doubt partly because so many of them had come from such families.
The comfortable Philistines were not the kind of people prepared to suffer and die for their beliefs. The Bolsheviks were. The tsarist government sent many of their leaders into Siberian exile, which did not break them but made them stronger.
“Exile stood for suffering, intimacy, and the sublime immensity of the heavenly depths. It offered a perfect metaphor for both what was wrong with the ‘world of lies’ and what was central to the promise of socialism,” writes Yuri Slezkine.7 To be a revolutionary in those days was to share a sense of purpose, of community, of hope—and an electrifying bond of contempt, a contempt we see in the social justice movement today toward anyone who differs from its religious claims.
As Slezkine has said, both the Christian faith and totalitarianism share an ultimate concern with the inner man. Christianity and communism—which is to say, the most radical form of progressivism—are best understood as competing religions. Despite the self-delusions of theologically progressive Christians, so too are Christianity and the easygoing nihilism that characterizes progressivism in our post-Christian era.
Heresy-Hunters in Our Midst
In 2019, I went to see the English public intellectual Sir Roger Scruton, in what turned out to be the last summer of his life, because of his work in the 1980s supporting dissidents in Eastern Europe. He was instrumental in helping to establish an underground university in Prague. As Britain’s best-known conservative academic, he subsequently emerged as one of the most penetrating and articulate critics of what we call “political correctness”—in part because he has so often been its victim.
Settling into his farmhouse library in rural Wiltshire, Sir Roger agreed that we are not waging a political battle but are rather engaged in a war of religion. “There is no official line in this, but it all congeals around a set of doctrines which we don’t have any problem in recognizing.”
He explained that in the emerging soft totalitarianism, any thought or behavior that can be identified as excluding members of groups favored by the Left is subject to harsh condemnation. This “official doctrine” is not imposed from above by the regime but rather arises by left-wing consensus from below, along with severe enforcement in the form of witch-hunting and scapegoating.
“If you step out of line, especially if you’re in the area of opinion-forming as a journalist or an academic, then the aim is to prevent your voice from being heard,” said Scruton. “So, you’ll be thrown out of whatever teaching position you have or, like me recently, made the topic of a completely mendacious fabricated interview used to accuse you of all the thoughtcrimes.”
Scruton was referring to a left-wing journalist to whom he had recently granted an interview. The journalist twisted Scruton’s words to make him sound like a bigot and crowed on social media that he had taken the scalp of a “racist and homophobe.” Fortunately, a recording of the interview emerged and vindicated Sir Roger. Many others in our time who are accused of similar thoughtcrimes—Orwell’s term for ideological offenses—are not so lucky.
Scruton told me that thoughtcrimes—heresies, in other words—by their very nature make accusation and guilt the same thing. He saw this in his travels in the communist world, where the goal was to keep the system in place with minimal effort.
“For this purpose, there were thoughtcrimes invented every now and then with which to trap the enemy of the people,” he said. “In my day it was the ‘Zionist Imperialist Conspiracy.’ You could be accused of being a member of that, and nobody could possibly find a defense against the accusation because nobody knew what it was!
“It’s just like ‘homophobia’ or ‘Islamophobia,’ these new thoughtcrimes,” Scruton continued. “What on earth do they mean? And then everyone can join in the throwing of electronic stones at the scapegoat and never be held to account for it, because you don’t have to prove the accusation.”
The reach of contemporary thoughtcrime expands constantly—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, bi-phobia, fat-phobia, racism, ableism, and on and on—making it difficult to know when one is treading on safe ground or about to step on a land mine. Yet Scruton is right: All of these thoughtcrimes derive from “doctrines”—his word—that are familiar to all of us. These doctrines inform the ideological thrust behind the soft totalitarianism of our own time as surely as Marxist doctrines of economic class struggle did the hard totalitarianism of the Soviet era.
One imagines an entry-level worker at a Fortune 500 firm, or an untenured university lecturer, suffering through the hundredth workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and doing their very best not to be suspected of dissent. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it at all. As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives. They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.
For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the
