The Politics of Harry Potter
In general I believe that any attempt to interpret popular works of art through a political lens is a fools errand, because indivduals can interpret the same piece of art in wildly different ways and in accordance with their own personal biases. I remember getting into a protracted and ultimately pointless debate years ago with a friend who believed THE 300 was an indictment of the Bush/Cheney rush to war in Iraq. I argued the opposite, that the movie was about the need to project strength and a warning about the dangers of ignoring an existential threat until it is literally on your doorstep. And the thing is, neither of us was wrong. You could mount an effective defense for either point of view without ever once arguing in bad faith.
But I also believe that in the case of Harry Potter, it’s important to push back against the popular Progressive assumption that all of the bad guys in the Potter stories repesent the political Right, while the good guys represent the Progressive Left, precisely because the Leftist view of Harry Potter is so wildly pervasive. And as tedious as the fight may seem, if left unopposed, a pervasive perception can quickly become reality.
It’s hard to think of a bigger cultural phenomenon than Harry Potter… you’d have to go all the way back to STAR WARS to find anything even remotely comparable. Over the last twenty years, the Harry Potter stories have become the Left’s go-to for cultural reference points with which to bash the Right. “Dumbledore’s Army” posters proliferated like spring rabbits in the #Resist protests that marked the beginning of the Trump Presidency. And strained comparisons between Lord Voldemort and every prominent GOP official from W Bush to Karl Rove to Dick Cheney to Mitch McConnell to Betsy DeVoss and eventually to Donald Trump himself have been such a commonplace pastime for The Left that a reactionary meme has since appeared on The Right…
#ReadAnotherBook!
I’ve always been confused by how and why The Left so quickly embraced the idea that the characters of Harry’s world were so self-evidently on the side of Progressivism, because I still remember being quite surprised by my first exposure to the Harry Potter movies. I saw something in them that I did not expect… a very traditional, even Conservative vision of a fictional society of wizards and witches.
And yes, obviously, I’m bringing my own biases to bear here, but I think that in order to believe the Leftist view of the series, you have to restrain yourself to very superficial interpretation of the characters and their actions. If you dig down below that surface interpretation, past the point where the Left conveniently stops, you begin to notice some very striking things.
For instance, contrary to our own Progressive-driven world of participation trophies and organized youth league games where no score is kept, Quidditch is a game where kids as young as eleven engage in what can only be called martial combat… and not just to “have fun” as the nearly constant emails from my son’s AYSO league remind me, but to win, and win decisively. Quidditch games are not postponed, or even delayed, for flagrant violence, cheating or even serious injury. And Harry himself faces near-certain death on the Quidditch pitch several times, including at least one fall from what looks like the cruising altitude of a 737.
Listen to the way the Weasley Twins describe the dangers of Quidditch to Harry before his first game…
There are less than 30 active Quidditch players in a given Hogwart’s school year (7 players times 4 houses) and yet people “get bloodied up”, “vanish”, and even die on the fairly regular. What Mom would let a child from the current generation of snowflakes play a game with that kind of risk profile? No, the American Left long ago abandoned the concept of informed risk-taking to Conservatives… if the COVID era taught us anything, it taught us that.
I also see, in Harry’s stories, a world where young kids are given deadly weapons, trained to use them for self defense, and required to carry them at all times… concealed no less. Does the Wizarding World have an Everytown for Wand Safety? If so, they must be apalled.
I see a world where professors intentionally place their students in challenging or even dangerous situations, secure in their belief as educators of well-rounded humans, that overcoming difficult challenges builds character and turns boys and girls into confident, decisive men and women.
Imagine the average COVID Karen who has been hiding in a toilet paper fort and triple-masking their kid for the last two years deciding to send him or her to a school where the Headmaster’s beginning of term speech sounded like this.
Yet Harry and his friends do indeed visit the haunted forest and that deadly corridor on the left hand side during the course of the story, facing all manner of lethal foes along the way. And in both cases they do so at the urging of… Professor Dumbledore himself. Again, we see here an embrace of the increasingly Conservative Value of informed risk-taking… because sometimes, facing danger is not only unavoidable, but necessary.
Just try telling that to the angry Karen screaming at you to pull your mask up over your nose.
In the Potter films I see a world where the elite institutions of Government are not just ineffective and inefficient, but corrupt and often evil. A world where kids are urged by their teachers to be critical thinkers, rather than blind rule followers, specifically because those Insititutions cannot always be trusted.
In modern American politics, which side is pushing for increased Government control over our lives and which side is arguing that Government’s repeated failures prove not only that it is unworthy of additional power, but that its attempts to sieze more power by means both fair and foul ought to be fought with every tool at our disposal?
Which side argues that any rule handed down by Government, no matter how destructive to life, liberty or property, must be followed to the letter as long as it can be plausibly argued that we are in the midst of an Emergency? And which side still clings to the idea that those who would chose safety over liberty deserve neither?
And of course any Conservative who has ever complained about the inneficiencies and soul-crushingly robotic enforcement of the rules they’ve experienced under the boot of Government agencies like the IRS and DMV, can certainly emphasize with Harry Potter’s many run-ins with the various bureaucratic functionaries of the Ministry of Magic.
Early in the Fifth book Harry faces certain death at the hands of a dangerous magical creature and casts a spell to save his own life. In doing so, he inadvertently defies a Ministry of Magic ban on underage magic. But the Ministry doesn’t care about the extenuating circumstances of Harry’s situation. All they care about is the meticulous and unflinching enforcement of their rules… and if the lives of children must be scarificed on the altar of regulatory absolutism, well then so be it. We can see something very similar occuring right now in our own world as the health and mental well-being of our children is ritually sacrificed on the Altar of “Zero-COVID” by an alphabet soup of Government Agencies both Federal and Local.
And I see, in the Wizarding World of Harry and his friends, a reality where the Press is rarely a force for good… where journalists lie about their subjects and place them in mortal peril on purpose. A world where reporters will do anything to get a story, will bravely falsify any facts that don’t back-up their pre-determined narrative, and will fight to censor anyone who dares to deviate from the “official truth.”
It’s not Conservatives doing that in modern America… it’s an unholy alliance of Government Agencies, woke corporations, and Big Tech… who first identify the guilty parties and then send their pretorian guard media out into the world to doxx the guilty and sell The Narrative to the credulous.
And then there’s the curious case of Ministry of Magic official Dolores Umbrage and her “Educational Decrees”, the most overtly political aspect of the Harry Potter stories. On the surface, Umbrage is the perfect stereotype of the uptight, sexually-repressed, subtly-bigoted older Conservative white woman in her pink cardigan sweater, and her strict Catholic Nun-like obsession with doling out pain and physical punishment.
But that’s exactly where the comparison between Umbrage and traditional Conservatism ends… right there on the surface. Scratch Dolores Umbrage but a little, and you’ll reveal a budding Marxist pupae struggling to escape from its cocoon.
Umbrage is most famous for getting Professor Dumbldore fired and then filling in briefly as Headmaster of Hogwarts. During her tenure, she enacts a series of “Educational Decrees” designed to help bring about her boss Lord Voldemort’s vision of a Wizarding World based on fear, cruelty and oppression.
Sure, there are the occassional sexually repressive decrees, like the ones that mandate six (and later eight) inches of distance between boys and girls. These are meant to evoke the hysterical religion-based repression associated with Conservative teachers in the 1950’s. But let’s be honest… it’s been sixty years since anyone squeezed a balloon in between two dancing teenagers, and FOOTLOOSE came out in 1984… almost forty years ago. If that’s the best argument you’ve got, if that’s really what you think Conservatives are like in 2022, then you’re every bit as square and out-of-touch as Reverend Shaw Moore.
More critical are the decrees that get at the heart of Lord Voldemort’s evil plans. Voldemort has a Hitlerian obsession with the concept of a “pure blood” wizarding world, where those who are not of “pure” blood are destined for exile, and eventually for extermination.
Decrees like Number 46, which banned from Hogwarts all literature written by non-wizards or half-breeds. Number 82 which required students to submit to questioning about suspected illegal activities. Number 98 which created the Inquisitorial Squad and 136 which encouraged students to inform on one another to that squad. Number 128 which banned all groups not approved by the High Inquisitor. And all of these preceded by Number 39, which banned wands, ensuring that all those who disagreed with Umbrage and her regime of torture and oppression would be unable to defend themselves effectively.
In America, it’s the Left who are banning and censoring opinions or writing that they don’t like, via their friends in Academia, The Media, Big Tech, and Woke Corporations… it’s the Left that supports a Cancel Culture where the accused are guilty until proven innocent… it’s the Left that is encouraging Americans to inform on fellow citizens who refuse to bend a knee to their Government’s increasingly oppresive COVID policies, or who dare to show up at School Board meetings to protest the sorting of their children by race. It’s the Left who seeks to ban all organizations that lean Conservative (see: examples like Parler, Prager U. and Bethany Mandel’s children’s book publisher)… “deplatforming” is the benign sounding term they’ve given it in order to obscure the awful reality of what they’re actually doing, but censorship by any other name would smell as foul. And it’s the Left who seek to ban guns so that there will be no option of last resort if the Right ever decides that this oppression has gone on long enough.
And as for that obsession with a world dominated by “pure bloods”… I look around at our current political reality and I only see one side of the political ailse actively separating Americans into groups according to their immutable charateristics like race and sex, so that they can confer benefits onto some groups and punishments onto others, and it ain’t The Right that’s doing it… it’s the side dominated by the Ibram X Kendis, Robin DiAngelos and Nikole Hannah Jones' of the world.
#ReadAnotherBook indeed…
As for me… if y’all need me, I’ll be out in the world, enjoying my life and engaging in a little informed risk taking… it’s good for what ails ya.
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Hey there! Thanks for reading the Continental Congress… while you’re here, if you’re interested in an all ages adventure novel that leans into the concepts of liberty, courage, and personal responsibility, please check out my novel OWL BOY AND THE VOODOO PRIEST… based on characters created by my oldest son when he was five. It’s a great story, if I do say so myself, and a fun way to support the work I do here…. plus, you’ll never have to worry about swallowing a load of woke garbage while reading it!
