Totalitarian Propaganda

I am really interested in Arendt’s section “Totalitarian Propaganda” in the chapter “The Totalitarian Movement.” Specifically, where she discusses the way propaganda blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. Arendt writes:
“The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which are presumably part...They are predisposed to all ideologies because they explain mere examples of laws and eliminate coincidence by inventing an all-embracing omnipotence which is supposed to be at the root of every accident. Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction from coincidence into consistency” (351)

She later discusses that by setting up a fictitious “Jewish world domination” as the driving force toward creating the “German world domination”:

“Nazi propaganda, in other words, discovered in “the supranational because intensely national Jew” the forerunner of the German master of the world and assured the masses that “the nations that have been the first to see through the Jew and have been the first to fight him are going to take his place in the domination of the world.” The delusion of an already existing Jewish world domination formed the basis for the illusion of future German world domination” (360).

I found this section interesting because although he do not have a totalitarian regime in the U.S., these characteristics seem all too familiar.  For example, the myth that foreigners or minorities will one day become a majority and dominate the United States seems really familiar. As I read Arendt’s book, I couldn’t help but make connections between certain characteristics she identifies as “totalitarian” present in our very own “democracy.” I wonder if there is any value in these comparisons?