Democracy rests as much on passive indifference as on active participation.

Evidence

The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of European nation-states and their party system in particular. The first was that the people in its majority had taken an active part in government and that each individual was in sympathy with one’s own or somebody else’s party. On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized by only a minority. The second democratic illusion exploded by the totalitarian movements was that these politically indifferent masses did not matter, that they were truly neutral and constituted no more than the inarticulate backward setting for the political life of the nation. Now they made apparent what no other organ of public opinion had ever been able to show, namely, that democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 748

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Arendt’s point that majority rule functions through silent tolerance of the indifferent — not active consent — reframes the legitimacy of democratic government and explains totalitarian success. This is a paradigm-shifting claim about legitimacy itself.
• XREF: Builds toward the field’s understanding of how exclusionary projects exploit passive majorities; parallels Gramscian common-sense hegemony (consent among the disengaged) and later arguments about manufactured consent.