Class-based interest parties collapse when their class bases dissolve

Evidence

The breakdown of the class system meant automatically the breakdown of the party system, chiefly because these parties, being interest parties, could no longer represent class interests. Their continuance was of some importance to the members of former classes who hoped against hope to regain their old social status and who stuck together not because they had common interests any longer but because they hoped to restore them. The parties, consequently, became more and more psychological and ideological in their propaganda, more and more apologetic and nostalgic in their political approach. They had lost, moreover, without being aware of it, those neutral supporters who had never been interested in politics because they felt that no parties existed to take care of their interests. So that the first signs of the breakdown of the Continental party system were not the desertion of old party members, but the failure to recruit members from the younger generation, and the loss of the silent consent and support of the unorganized masses who suddenly shed their apathy and went wherever they saw an opportunity to voice their new violent opposition. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 754

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the scaffolding theme — party breakdown precedes rather than follows mass mobilization, a mechanism Arendt develops as a precondition for totalitarian movements. — connects to: Deindustrialization shattered social democracy’s class coalition — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 79; Establishment center-left parties can collapse from dominance to irrelevance in years. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 169; Social democrats faced a structural dilemma between class base and middle-class concessions — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 18