Tribal nationalism perverts sacred election into a claim of racial superiority.

Evidence

For tribal nationalism is the precise perversion of a religion which made God choose one nation, one’s own nation; only because this ancient myth, together with the only people surviving from antiquity, had struck deep roots in Western civilization could the modern mob leader, with a certain amount of plausibility, summon up the impudence to drag God into the petty conflicts between peoples and to ask His consent to an election which the leader had already happily manipulated. The hatred of the racists against the Jews sprang from a superstitious apprehension that it actually might be the Jews, and not themselves, whom God had chosen, to whom success was granted by divine providence. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 615

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines tribal nationalism as a perversion of a religion of divine chosenness — a mechanism-level definition of how sacred concepts degrade into racial ideology.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s scaffolding on colonial psychology and racialized selfhood; the chosenness-to-racial-perversion arc parallels later accounts of how religious identity becomes race in Islamophobic discourse.