The unified immigrant-enemy category was engineered by intellectuals, not mass instinct.
Evidence
On the other hand, the discovery that the miscellaneous Slavs, Jews, and Italians constituted a collective type, a “new immigration,” dawned more gradually. The concept of a new immigration would seem to have been largely the work of cultivated minds rather than a simple derivative of popular instincts. Certainly mass opinion in the nineties pictured the Italian, the Slav, and the Jew chiefly within the context of a general foreign peril. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 563
Categorization
- XREF: Strong evidence for reader’s thesis that a constructed enemy category is manufactured from above — cultivated minds imposing a collective type on heterogeneous groups, resonating with manufactured-threat theories. — connects to: Authoritarian prejudice is ideological, not rooted in psychodynamic conflict. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 1602; Ideology is shaped within material institutions, not by class or economics. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 129
- QUESTION: Does this intellectual-top-down construction of the enemy parallel modern manufactured categories (e.g. ‘woke mob’ or ‘globalists’) that also unify heterogeneous targets?
Broader Connections
- Authoritarian prejudice is ideological, not rooted in psychodynamic conflict.
#corroborates(0.75) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1602 - Ideology is shaped within material institutions, not by class or economics.
#corroborates(0.72) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 129