Threat-hardened leaders alienated followers, so predicted radicalization never happened

Evidence

Through their inability to adjust to the social, political and attitudinal changes of the 1960s, the expellee organizations again made a positive contribution to expellee integration and broader social stability in West Germany, albeit in a paradoxical fashion: by alienating the majority of the people whom they purported to represent. After having proclaimed for years that a governmental recognition of the territorial status quo in Eastern Europe would provoke massive expellee protests and risk large-scale political radicalization, expellee leaders were now forced to recognize that the bulk of their supposed followers refused to conform to such stereotypes. Far from rushing to the barricades to demand continued hardline policies, growing numbers of expellees explicitly rejected the popular legitimacy of their self-proclaimed representatives, publicly accusing them of ‘fanaticism’ and ‘dangerous illusions’. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 593

Categorization

• XREF: A textbook instance of the backfire-of-correction and threat-hardened-belief question in the reader’s research purpose, but inverted: the elites’ own radicalization emptied the movement rather than mobilizing it. — connects to: Alienation without meaning inevitably drives people toward violence.

Broader Connections

• Alienation without meaning inevitably drives people toward violence. #contradicts (0.85)