Antisemitic demagoguery found its natural audience in the lower middle class

Evidence

Feudal aristocracy, however, though still powerful enough to influence public opinion, was in itself neither strong nor important enough to start a real antisemitic movement like the one that began in the eighties. Their spokesman, Court Chaplain Stoecker, himself a son of lower middle-class parents, was a much less gifted representative of conservative interests than his predecessors, the romantic intellectuals who had formulated the main tenets of a conservative ideology some fifty years earlier. Moreover, he discovered the usefulness of antisemitic propaganda not through practical or theoretical considerations but by accident, when he, with the help of a great demagogic talent, found out it was highly useful for filling otherwise empty halls. But not only did he fail to understand his own sudden successes; as court chaplain and employee of both the royal family and the government, he was hardly in a position to use them properly. His enthusiastic audiences were composed exclusively of lower middle-class people, small shopkeepers and tradesmen, artisans and old-fashioned craftsmen. And the anti-Jewish sentiments of these people were not yet, and certainly not exclusively, motivated by a conflict with the state. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 139

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Islamophobia field’s treatment of how demagogic leaders manufacture targets for anxious classes; anticipates Arendt’s later argument that antisemitism was exploited from above rather than genuinely rooted among the aristocracy. — connects to: Working-class anti-Semitism may stem more from real experience than middle-class hatred — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1562; Jews’ partial conformity to middle-class norms fueled antisemitic resentment. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1540
• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that a failed court preacher stumbled into antisemitism as a crowd-filling device — politics as accidental demagoguery — is a genuinely counterintuitive mechanism worth sitting with.