Shame about particular interests drives parties to claim universal ideological justifications.

Evidence

The trouble with the Continental parties, separated on principle from government and power, was not so much that they were trapped in the narrowness of particular interests as that they were ashamed of these interests and therefore developed those justifications which led each one into an ideology claiming that its particular interests coincided with the most general interests of humanity. The conservative party was not content to defend the interests of landed property but needed a philosophy according to which God had created man to till the soil by the sweat of his brow. The same is true for the progress ideology of the middle-class parties and for the labor parties’ claim that the proletariat is the leader of mankind. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 640

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key mechanism for the field toolkit: ideology as the shame-transcending universalization of particular interest — directly portable to analyses of nationalist and Islamophobic ideology.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony and the privileging of universalist claims in later field readings; also to Mannheim on ideology. — connects to: Collective guilt is contested through ideological debate between privileged and disadvantaged groups. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 592
• SEED: Angle: how shame about naked interest produces grandeur in political rhetoric — measurable across party manifestos and nationalist discourse.