From an interview with Hannah Arendt scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge:
This is the creation of the mass and it isn’t just fascism. This isn’t just populism. This is totalitarianism proper in Arendt’s mind. She says at one point, and this is a quote that’s resonated with me for a few years now, that “the masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they’re forced to live.” Often the question is, well, how can people be so stupid? How can anyone fall for this? That’s the wrong way to think about it. Totalitarian politics is a verdict against the world in which people are forced to live. It’s a slap in the face. It’s a finger up against the real conditions of existence.
People will often refer to the masses as if they’re gullible and stupid, which on the one hand is just terrible politics. But on the other hand, it’s actually stupid. I mean, people aren’t stupid. A term that’s just as important as loneliness is cynicism. Totalitarianism works through cynicism. It’s crucial because it allows people to say, “They’re all the same, it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? It’s just politics, isn’t it?” What cynicism allows you to do is be gullible and disbelieving at the same time.
The conditions for totalitarianism require the mass alienation of people from the "system", and the conditions that engender that mass alienation are both material and metaphysical. Metaphysical is maybe not the right word, because other things provide meaning in people's lives that are only metaphysical-ish. But the point is that people can put up with horrifying material conditions if there's a deeply felt meaningful justification for them to do so. Look at Ukraine. People can endure significant levels of suffering if it is understood as a necessary sacrifice for a plausible, imagined positive future.
But if the great majority in a society is suffering materially and for no good reason, and if there's no reason to think that things are going to get better--then watch out. That's our situation in the U.S. Once there's widespread cynicism about how the system works and whom it serves, it's hard to see how you save it.
Why should we be cynical. Well it traces back to Vietnam according to Stonebridge--
... the last paper that she [Arendt] published was based on a talk that she gave in 1975. She was asked to speak a few weeks after the fall of Saigon, and she says, “this is what America has to face: It’s gone further and further away from itself into a culture in which politics is marketing, in which politics is PR.” For her, the fall of Saigon revealed that America had just suffered a humiliating and outright defeat.
Then she listed the things that led up to that. She talked about the Pentagon Papers and how they revealed that there was no purpose to that war other than maintaining the fiction that America was an all-powerful free nation — a fiction, by the way, that was good enough for other people’s children to die for. Watergate showed that this whole thing was being cooked up by a bunch of second-rate crooks. This was politics. This was American politics.
She insisted that we had to recognize that reality. And the reality was that America was not great and free and wonderful, it was not that powerful. We had just suffered a catastrophic loss, and we had jeopardized our politics at the same time. That’s what she called the “big lie,” a phrase that was picked up again when Trump pushed his own big lie about the election. She said that this is how totalitarianism works. You just invent an outrageous big lie and you stick to it.
After Vietnam we had an opportunity for a reckoning, and instead we got Reagan. I just read Matt Continetti's book The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. It's a good history from a fair-minded conservative's pov. But the one thing that Reagan-admiring conservatives like Continetti seem incapable of seeing is that he continued the fiction, a fiction that in the long run has led us to its reductio ad absurdum in the kind of cynicism that is at the heart of MAGA.