Muggles, not bad guys, put Trump in power

Last week we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the first Harry Potter novel, and the beginning of a cultural juggernaut that defined a generation’s experience with books.

If you believe what you read on social media the Potterverse has never been more relevant. As Western politics has become more extreme, the Potter novels have been embraced ever more fervently as political allegories and moral manuals for our times.

Writing for The Spectator recently, Lara Prendergast offered a harsh assessment of the trend: “If you have ever wondered why young people are often so childish in their politics, why they want to divide the world between tolerant progressives and wicked reactionaries, it helps to understand” that they think they’re living in a Potter novel.

I’m not sure that sort of Manichaean vision is actually the most important political teaching in the Potter novels. Because if you take the Potterverse seriously as an allegory for ours, the most noteworthy divide isn’t between the good multicultural wizards and the bad racist ones. It’s between all the wizards, good and bad, and everybody else — the Muggles.

For the six readers who don’t already know: Muggles are nonmagical folks, the billions of regular everyday human beings who live and work in blissful ignorance that the wizarding world exists.

The proper treatment of Muggles is the great controversy within the wizarding world, where the good guys want them protected, left alone and sometimes studied, while the bad guys want to see them subjugated or enslaved.

All of this plays as an allegory for racism, but only up to a point, because what’s notable is that nobody actually wants to see the mass of Muggles actually integrated into the wizarding society. You’re either born with magic or you aren’t, and if you aren’t there’s really not any obvious place for you in Hogwarts.

Which makes the thrill of becoming a magical initiate in the Potterverse remarkably similar to the thrill of being chosen by the modern meritocracy, plucked from the ordinary ranks of life and ushered into gothic halls and exclusive classrooms, where you will be sorted according to your talents and your just deserts.

I am stealing this magicand-meritocracy parallel from the pseudonymous blogger Spotted Toad, who wrote a fine post discussing how much the Potter novels and movies trade upon the powerful loyalty that their readers feel toward their teachers and their schools. But not just any school — not some suburban high school or generic Podunk U. No, it’s loyalty to a selective school, with an antique pedigree but a modern claim to excellence, an exclusive admissions process but a pleasingly multicultural student body. A school where everybody knows that they belong, because they can do the necessary magic and ordinary Muggles can’t.

Thus the Potterverse, as Toad writes, is about “the legitimacy of authority that comes from schools.” And because “contemporary liberalism is the ideology of imperial academia... responsible ultimately only to itself,” a story about a wizarding academy is the perfect fantasy story for the liberal meritocracy to tell about itself.

Especially because, unlike in reality, it writes the Muggles, the genuinely ordinary people, out of its good-versus-evil conflicts. In the Potter novels, the threats to that world’s liberal integrity all come from within the academy’s walls, from Slytherin House and its arrogant aristocrats. And so the battle for Harvard — er, Hogwarts — is the battle for the world.

Which is basically the premise of a great deal of youthful liberal activism these days — that once the last remnants of Slytherin are eradicated from the leafy quads of Yale or Middlebury, then the battle of ideas will have been finally and fully won.

But even if it were, beyond the walls of the imperial academy, all of our world’s Muggles would still remain, with an agency and a power that they don’t have in the Potterverse.

Because after all it was mostly Muggles, not some dark conspiracy by the Slytherin sort of conservatives, who put Donald Trump in power.

In the Potterverse, the meritocracy of magic allows the chosen to withdraw into their academic world, leaving Muggledom to its own devices.

In our universe, though, the meritocracy of talent expects the chosen to actually go out and try to rule. And how to lead wisely in a society where most people did not go to Hogwarts is a lesson that J.K. Rowling’s lovely, lively, but ultimately childish novels do not teach.