Elites were drawn to totalitarian movements by radicalism for its own sake

Evidence

What appealed to the elite was radicalism as such. Marx’s hopeful predictions that the state would wither away and a classless society emerge were no longer radical, no longer Messianic enough. If Berdyaev is right in stating that “Russian revolutionaries …had always been totalitarian,” then the attraction which Soviet Russia exerted almost equally on Nazi and Communist intellectual fellow-travelers lay precisely in the fact that in Russia “the revolution was a religion and a philosophy, not merely a conflict concerned with the social and political side of life.” The truth was that the transformation of classes into masses and the breakdown of the prestige and authority of political institutions had brought to Western European countries conditions which resembled those prevalent in Russia, so that it was no accident that their revolutionaries also began to take on the typically Russian revolutionary fanaticism which looked forward, not to change in social or political conditions, but to the radical destruction of every existing creed, value, and institution. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 799

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the shift: the promise of a classless society (Marx) stopped being radical enough; what seized elites was the transformation of revolution into a religion/philosophy aimed at destroying all creeds, values, institutions.
• XREF: Ties to the broader toolkit concept that totalitarian revolutionaries targeted destruction of every creed and institution, not social change — a mechanism later Islamophobia readings build on. — connects to: Contemporaries widely predicted expellees would radicalize politically — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 96