Totalitarian rule removes all reliable mediating levels between ruler and ruled

Evidence

Technically, this absence of any authority or hierarchy in the totalitarian system is shown by the fact that between the supreme power (the Fuehrer) and the ruled there are no reliable intervening levels, each of which would receive its due share of authority and obedience. The will of the Fuehrer can be embodied everywhere and at all times, and he himself is not tied to any hierarchy, not even the one he might have established himself. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 917

Categorization

• DEFINE: The structural mechanism that defines totalitarian administration: the Leader’s will is directly embodied at every level with no functioning intermediate hierarchy.
• XREF: connects to: Four Supreme Court rulings dismantle organized popular power at every level — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 302