Personal failure before politics was the strongest factor in mass leaders’ appeal

Evidence

This breakdown, when the smugness of spurious respectability gave way to anarchic despair, seemed the first great opportunity for the elite as well as the mob. This is obvious for the new mass leaders whose careers reproduce the features of earlier mob leaders: failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life. The fact that their lives prior to their political careers had been failures, naively held against them by the more respectable leaders of the old parties, was the strongest factor in their mass appeal. It seemed to prove that individually they embodied the mass destiny of the time and that their desire to sacrifice everything for the movement, their assurance of devotion to those who had been struck by catastrophe, their determination never to be tempted back into the security of normal life, and their contempt for respectability were quite sincere and not just inspired by passing ambitions. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 778

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘mob’ and ‘mass’ concepts Arendt develops throughout the volume, and to the standard explanation of fascist leaders’ appeal in the Islamophobia readings on racism and populism.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that visible failure itself — not competence — proves sincerity and mass-identification is a genuinely counterintuitive mechanism for why failed men fascinate the devastated.