Totalitarian party rule works through exclusion, not mass membership

Evidence

This principle was strictly enforced as soon as the Nazis seized power. Of 7 million members of the Hitler youth only 50,000 were accepted for party membership in 1937. … Even the One-Party must never grow to the point where it would embrace the whole population. It is ‘total’ because of its ideological influence on the nation.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2658

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Counterintuitive mechanism — the ‘total’ party deliberately limits its own membership to maximize ideological reach — parallels later analyses of exclusionary identity production in Islamophobia readings.

Related

• The Nazi party deliberately excluded even loyal followers from membership (similarity 0.85)
• Totalitarian domination cannot be derived from one-party systems (similarity 0.82)