Race doctrines gained appeal by granting aristocratic status by birth

Evidence

The close relationship of this to more modern race ideologies need not be stressed, and Disraeli’s discovery is one more proof of how well they serve to combat feelings of social inferiority. For if race doctrines finally served much more sinister and immediately political purposes, it is still true that much of their plausibility and persuasiveness lay in the fact that they helped anybody feel himself an aristocrat who had been selected by birth on the strength of “racial” qualification. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 237

Categorization

• XREF: This psychological mechanism — race ideology as a salve for social inferiority — is a transferable component for understanding how exclusionary identities attract adherents. — connects to: Admiration for aristocratic rule slid logically into racial contempt — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 224; Nobility is an acquired ethical stance available to anyone regardless of class origin — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 838
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that race doctrine spreads because it lets anyone feel an aristocrat ‘selected by birth’ — democratizing nobility — is a dense, counterintuitive mechanism worth sitting with.