Organized mob politics emerges when elites aestheticize the mob as vital strength

Evidence

What was new in all this was not the activity of the mob; for that there were abundant precedents. What was new and surprising at the time—though all too familiar to us—was the organization of the mob and the hero-worship enjoyed by its leaders. The mob became the direct agent of that “concrete” nationalism espoused by Barrés, Maurras, and Daudet, who together formed what was undoubtedly a kind of elite of the younger intellectuals. These men, who despised the people and who had themselves but recently emerged from a ruinous and decadent cult of estheticism, saw in the mob a living expression of virile and primitive “strength.” It was they and their theories which first identified the mob with the people and converted its leaders into national heroes. It was their philosophy of pessimism and their delight in doom that was the first sign of the imminent collapse of the European intelligentsia. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 319

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly anticipates the intellectuals-betray-the-masses theme Arendt develops later and that Islamophobia scholarship rereads in colonial/nationalist contexts.
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense causal claim: elite aesthetic pessimism, not economics, converts mob into the people and hollows out the intelligentsia — mechanism worth sitting with.

Related

• Intellectuals converted the organized mob into an idealized national force. (similarity 0.91)
• Mob and elite alliance arose because both were first eliminated from nation-state structure (similarity 0.82)
• Totalitarian themes were pre-prepared by imperialism and the mob’s entry into politics. (similarity 0.82)
• Mob attitudes are bourgeois convictions stripped of their hypocrisy (similarity 0.81)
• Mob leaders promised each member embodiment of ideals merely by joining (similarity 0.80)
• Elite intellectuals were drawn to totalitarian movements, not only mob elements. (similarity 0.80)
• Mob leaders weaponized Jews as ideology regardless of Jewish actual importance. (similarity 0.80)
• Totalitarian leaders emerged from the mob before the masses they organized. (similarity 0.79)
• Aristocracies weaponized antisemitic slogans to mobilize mobs against liberalism (similarity 0.79)