Tradition-sanctioned opinions mask new doctrines’ incompatibility with existing standards

Evidence

Since, however, race-thinking did exist, it proved to be a powerful help to racism. The very existence of an opinion which could boast of a certain tradition served to hide the destructive forces of the new doctrine which, without this appearance of national respectability or the seeming sanction of tradition, might have disclosed its utter incompatibility with all Western political and moral standards of the past, even before it was allowed to destroy the comity of European nations. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 483

Categorization

• XREF: Mechanism of ‘respectability laundering’ — connects to Gramscian hegemony theory about how dominant ideas render power invisible through ‘common sense’.