Time & Perspective Quote by Hannah Arendt

Arendt’s sentence slices through a comforting democratic myth: that “the people” are naturally the engine of political extremism. She draws a colder map. Totalitarianism, she suggests, has two constituencies that can fall for it on its own terms: the mob, untethered and resentful, and the elite, bored, opportunistic, or seduced by the thrill of remaking society. Both can be “attracted by the momentum” because momentum is the point: the intoxication of movement, inevitability, history-with-a-capital-H.

The masses, though, are different. “Have to be won” implies work, strategy, an apparatus. Arendt’s subtext is that ordinary people don’t typically crave nihilistic upheaval for its own sake; they have jobs, families, routines, small fears. Totalitarianism can’t rely on spontaneous mass desire. It needs persuasion, simplification, repetition, and a story that turns complexity into a plot. Propaganda isn’t a decorative accessory to power; it’s the bridge between elite ambition, mob rage, and everyday consent.

Context matters: writing in the shadow of Nazism and Stalinism, Arendt was tracking how modern regimes mobilize societies that, on paper, should resist them. Her formulation is also a warning about misdiagnosis. If you think totalitarianism is just “the masses gone mad,” you miss the upstream actors who benefit from the chaos and the downstream machinery that normalizes it. The truly modern terror isn’t only violence; it’s the narrative factory that makes violence feel like order.