Ridiculous aristocratic racial theories gained serious respectability by the turn of the century

Evidence

Nobility no longer needed to fear the victory of the Tiers Etat, it had already occurred and they could only complain. Their distress, as expressed by Gobineau, sometimes comes very near to the great despair of the poets of decadence who, a few decades later, sang the frailty of all things human—les neiges d’antan, the snows of yesteryear. As far as Gobineau himself was concerned, this affinity is rather incidental; but it is interesting to note that once this affinity was established, nothing could prevent very respectable intellectuals at the turn of the century, like Robert Dreyfus in France or Thomas Mann in Germany, from taking this descendant of Odin seriously. Long before the horrible and the ridiculous had merged into the humanly incomprehensible mixture that is the hallmark of our century, the ridiculous had lost its power to kill. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 459

Categorization

• XREF: The horrifying-and-ridiculous fusion is a mechanism relevant to how the Islamophobia field tracks ideology becoming respectable. — connects to: Oxford transformed hereditary arrogance into upper-class ideology of noblesse oblige — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 210