Tribal and racist ideology functions as escape from common responsibility

Evidence

Tribalism and racism are the very realistic, if very destructive, ways of escaping this predicament of common responsibility. Their metaphysical rootlessness, which matched so well the territorial uprootedness of the nationalities it first seized, was equally well suited to the needs of the shifting masses of modern cities and was therefore grasped at once by totalitarianism; even the fanatical adoption by the Bolsheviks of the greatest antinational doctrine, Marxism, was counteracted and Pan-Slav propaganda reintroduced in Soviet Russia because of the tremendous isolating value of these theories in themselves. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 598

Categorization

• XREF: The isolating value of ideology explains later totalitarian co-optation — connects forward to Arendt’s own account of Stalinism and to how Islamophobic discourse isolates and atomizes. — connects to: Tribal political beliefs function as identity markers validated by repetition, not evidence — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 126; Political responsibility requires abandoning the fantasy of escaping human forms of life — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 356
• DEFINE: Names ‘metaphysical rootlessness’ as the feature making tribal ideology portable to uprooted masses.