The collapse of class parties after WWI opened the way for totalitarian movements

Evidence

The pan-movements’ hostility to the party system acquired practical significance when, after the first World War, the party system ceased to be a working device and the class system of European society broke down under the weight of growing masses entirely declassed by events. What came to the fore then were no longer mere pan-movements but their totalitarian successors, which in a few years determined the politics of all other parties to such a degree that they became either anti-Fascist or anti-Bolshevik or both. By this negative approach seemingly forced upon them from the outside, the older parties showed clearly that they too were no longer able to function as representatives of specific class interests but had become mere defenders of the status quo. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 653

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffolding on hegemony and how the breakdown of class-based representation creates space for totalitarian alternatives — a mechanism that recurs in Gramsci and later Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Competing state-capitalist blocs destabilized the global economy and caused World War II. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 521; Economic collapse destroyed social fabric and private life before Nazism’s rise — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 253; Weimar’s hybrid socialist-capitalist system collapsed when economic crisis struck — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 928 (+5 more)