Historical competition, not will, determines which ideologies win mass adhesion

Evidence

It is evident that this kind of mass creation cannot just happen “arbitrarily”, around any ideology, simply because of the formally constructive will of a personality or a group which puts it forward solely on the basis of its own fanatical philosophical or religious convictions. Mass adhesion or non-adhesion to an ideology is the real critical test of the rationality and historicity of modes of thinking. Any arbitrary constructions are pretty rapidly eliminated by historical competition, even if sometimes, through a combination of immediately favourable circumstances, they manage to enjoy popularity of a kind; whereas constructions which respond to the demands of a complex organic period of history always impose themselves and prevail in the end, even though they may pass through several intermediary phases during which they manage to affirm themselves only in more or less bizarre and heterogeneous combinations. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1227

Categorization

• XREF: Mass adhesion as the ‘real critical test’ resonates with how the Islamophobia literature tests whether specific anti-Muslim representations actually take hold versus remaining elite constructions.