The study of history is rife with interpretation. So much so that the discipline developed its own way of codifying these interpretations of the past. Historiography - that is the study of how history itself is told and narrated. This is a fascinating field in and of itself when looking at near past and far past events. It is the attempt of the observer to identify the ideological disposition of the historian and place that within a wider context. For example Marxist Historians are going to trend towards ideological explanations of certain events. In the worst examples these leads to half truths and cherry written accounts of the past - where certain events may be glossed entirely because it does not fit with the narrative. A good example of that would be the popular history surrounding opposition to the Vietnam war in America. We are over saturated with stories of opposition and so most people have no idea about events such as the Hard Hat Riots.
Historiography is the attempt to give the student of history an insight or a degree of self awareness about the historians they read. To understand how those historians might weight certain evidence versus others. This can be revealing, indeed it is not that different to the ‘red-pill’ moments that many of us experience. Suddenly the dominant narratives that we had gone along with, grown up around fall away and we are viewing the world through a totally different pair of (sun)glasses. The cinematic version of this best captured in They Live. This moment of reckoning reshapes everything over time and you find yourself viewing everything with a new perspective. You re-evaluate what perhaps you once enjoyed and question the ideological subversion that is present within it.
Popular films of the past now appear hackneyed propaganda pieces and fun television shows of light hearted humor are suddenly strewn with the enemies ideology. We pivot on a dime and in many ways there is an element of enjoyment that is lost. We have a critical lens placed in front of us. It is easy today to spot the racial TV and film casting choices of having random blacks appear in settings where they did not exist but watching older films we suddenly wonder “did this character have to be black?” Nothing feels trustworthy anymore. We react reflexively.
There is a different side to this of course, one that is harder to put into words but is perhaps made most famous by JK Rowling. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series is sneered at by almost everyone on the right. It has become a meme caricature of the left. Indeed every dumb blue haired woke leftist was at some point fawning over the Harry Potter books or films. This was an extraordinarily popular series for children and is loved by many. But then so is Lord of the Rings. Indeed I found it fascinating that the recent air force idiot who immolated for browns had media coverage that described him as loving ‘Lord of the Rings’. Presumably he was most smitten with the insanity of King Denethor who self immolated delusionally. Jokes aside there are many on the left who also love Lord of the Rings in spite of its deeply right wing monarchistic message. What makes the Harry Potter series so different? Why are rightists so against it - is it the message in the books or the warblings of Rowling herself?
At this point I should note I’m not the first to write or talk about this. I recall some tiny dissident rightist putting out YouTube videos discussing this, and even mainstream commentators have talked about how Rowling’s creation is far more steeped in everything the left claims to hate but I’m going to offer my own take, my own interpretation of the inherent right wing themes present in her books and universe as well as the leftist ones that get the most screeching.
Blood
The most obvious right wing theme that jumps out at you in the Harry Potter universe is the importance placed upon blood. Magical ability in her universe is reliant on blood magic of some kind. Wizarding families have a pedigree and whilst Rowling makes the bad guys of the story the ones overly obsessed about blood purity it is quite obvious and apparent that there exists an entire separate race of humans imbued with magical blood. It isn’t only Draco Malfoy who has a pure heritage but also Ron Weasely, whilst they are presented as opposites there is a truth that Rowling is relying upon even as she introduces the idea of ‘squibs’ or offspring of Wizards who lack magical ability. That truth is that blood and birth matter.
Nowhere in her extended universe is it possible for the non-magical humans to become magical. It is innate. You either have it or you don’t. And whilst she makes one of her protagonists - Hermonie - have two non-magical parents the inherent inequality of birth is what grants her the magical powers. Even the opposites of Hermonie - the squibs with no magical ability are aware of the wizarding world and can see Hogwarts and other creatures where muggles cannot. Blood confers certain abilities even if magic is not passed on. The rarity of both sets is such that we can arrive at the age old adage “the exception proves the rule”.
To be sure Rowling then frames portions of the story around this divide of blood. The wizards who are accepting of the muggle born or half muggle wizards are pitted against the old bloods who are in essence the racists of the series. Yet the ideological nature is still heavily watered down and she can’t escape the inherent inequality of the magical system she has created. Perhaps this even goes some way to explaining Rowlings steadfast anti-Trans stance? After all whilst her woke readership believes a woman can have a penis and magically become female even in her universe of magic what you are born with in your genes is what determines who you are.
So the inherent inequality of her magical system whilst also used as a plot device to shape the bad guys is not their driving force. It is a constant of the world. To my mind too much is made of this - her arch villain of the series is as much motivated by power and loss than simply some kind of racial purity that involves a kind of muggle born genocide. The inequality of blood as a theme is far more conservative a system at work than what could have been.
Hogwarts, Hierarchy and Castes
One of the subtler story arcs that runs throughout the book is in essence the problem of weak leadership - the downfall of the Ministry of Magic. The power centers of the British Wizarding world appear to be divided in part between their Ministry of Magic and Hogwarts. The Ministry of Magic is presented as a kind of weak bumbling institution that is failing, it was once valued and respected in the past but now is past its prime. This of course represents a yearning for the past which is present throughout the book and we’ll discuss in more depth later but the idea of a strong leader being part of the issue is again a somewhat more conservative theme to explore.
Hogwarts itself continues to expand on the unequal ideas that her blood based magic system brings us. We of course have the Sorting Hat - place it on your head and it determines where to go. Now there seems to be an element of choice present here - the Hat debates sending Harry to Slytherin but his desires to avoid it have him end up in Gryffindor. Now these houses are of course themselves modeled after the houses in the British boarding school system. My father went to boarding school so I’m more familiar than some but I don’t have first hand experience. The houses are a way of organizing the school but they also serve to create a sense of unity and competition. You represent your house in sports and academics. Rowling didn’t create anything new here she just borrowed from the existing world. That existing world still had the idea that creating group identity can foster camaraderie - they also foster conflict and the us vs them. This of course is naturally mirrored in Rowling’s universe with an added twist. Where boarding houses are random in British schools in Hogwarts they say something about the true character of a person, they are crude archetypes. We never hear of a person going between houses at Hogwarts, it’s a clannish insular identity that one does not cross between at will.
The school life that the protagonists inhabit is modeled after the past. These teachers are strict. There is meaningful detention and testing. There is competition between the houses, there are winners and losers. It is not so much these things are ‘right wing’ as that they were the norm and Rowling wrote about the norm of the past. The very fabric of the school life that appealed to tens of thousands of adolescents is in direct contrast to the equality based participation trophy schooling they themselves went through. It has this romantic edge to it but that romantic edge is not in fact just of an imagined world but of a more structured and hierarchical one.
The other creatures that inhabit the wizards world also live in accordance with their nature. We of course have the goblins at Gringots (enough with the anti-Semitic tropes!) and then we have the incredibly amusing and ham fisted side story of Hermoine and the House Elves. The whole story arc of the House Elves is about how they reject freedom and pick servitude because they realize it has more value than the illusion of freedom. Whatever Rowling set out to do with that story arc she seemed to realize it would fail and it kind of sputters out with some freedom for the badly treated Dobby but for the rest it is life and work as usual. This is what I think of often when you poke at the surface of what Rowling has created - it created more problems than she tried to solve and so she just defaulted to what was natural and sensible.
The biggest giveaway of all this is of course Rowling’s post hoc justifications. They became a meme themselves of how she’d just retroactively say “Well X was gay”. She herself also led the way with the politicization of her own books - by being an activist author she tied her politics to the story she had written after the fact. It is also why she has seen such blow back, and to her credit I do at the very least respect her for standing up for female spaces and fighting the trans lunacy. She has enough money yes but in this case she genuinely seems to stand firm in this belief she has.
Aesthetics
Life is an aesthetic experience. A huge part of Rowling’s success with the books and universe was her world-building. The books themselves are bog standard plot driven vehicles with cardboard characters BUT where she excelled was with an imaginative world of magic living parallel and hidden to ours. She is not the first to use the backdrop of the past to imprint modern values on - we see that today all the time with any TV show we have. We are treated to dull and uninteresting historical ‘dramas’ that inject modern values and humor into the past to create a complete circle for the midwit liberal. Rowling tried to do the same of course, but as we have looked out she floundered in multiple ways. Her strength was truly in the world building.
What kind of a world is it? It’s one where beauty is ever present. Where the past is more real and desirable than the present. It’s grounded in a sense of Britain in a similar way the Lord of the Rings is grounded in the English countryside. The descriptions of places like Diagon Alley are almost love poems to the past. They are hidden within our human world but provide an aesthetic trip back in time. Rowling writes inherently of a homogenous high trust society. Again her post hoc diversity signaling and the smattering of a few brown and black faces in the books are her ideological attempts to square a circle. It’s implicit except for where she explicitly goes out of her way - perhaps if she were re-writing the books today it would be the case that Hermonie or Ron is black but that is only possible for her to imagine because of todays climate. Her instinct was never to do that.
Other conservative talking heads have talked about this phenomena. They frame it as a kind of window dressing. Indeed there is a lot of recent popular culture that does this. The Witcher springs to mind for me - ostensibly set amongst Eastern European folklore the TV series was at odds to insert random sub-saharan blacks everywhere they could. That is one thing of course but it is also the insertion of todays values into the past (or into fantasy settings) think girl bossism and the like. Elements of the Harry Potter story have this but they seem less hamfisted and more organic. It largely seems to contain the value set of mid to late 1990s England and it’s hardly has bad as some make out.
Rowling’s aesthetic choices also hint at an interesting approach towards technology. Magic is basically a form of technology. Wizards can fly on brooms, they can travel via fireplaces, there are also teleportation devices. Why then have the archaic steam train of the Hogwarts Express? Perhaps just aesthetics and plot building but it is how our protagonists meet and interact. It showcases an oddly conservative approach to technology. Even in the wizarding world there seems to be a value placed on tradition. The train of course is a gentle method of travel, it’s not instantaneous like the fireplace travel or magical teleportation and it is communal. It brings the students together as they return to their boarding school world.
Rowling’s world building often seems to take this idealized approach towards technology. This is only something noticed with a retrospectively critical eye about how disruptive our own technology is of course. What she builds and creates with her unique technology system (magic) is largely small c conservative in nature. It is in some ways thoughtful and limiting in all the right ways. This isn’t unique to her of course, this is a rather common theme in the fantasy and sci-fi settings but here it is more implicit than explicit.
Concluding thoughts
One goal of the dissident for the future is to offer explanations and interpretations of the current day as well as the recent past. We are like historians in that we have a lens with which we view the world. Where the Marxist sees everything in terms of class struggle we are also going to be subject to our own viewpoints. Perhaps I am just wearing rose tinted glasses, as a child I enjoyed reading about the world Rowling had created, although I never watched the films. The world had a charm to it for the reasons listed above. Indeed when I visited a friend who was studying at Kings College Cambridge I was struck by just how inspired Rowling must have been by such places and institutions. One of the curious rules and traditions of the college is that only professors could walk on the grass. Students had to stay on the paths. I visited during exam time and so access to the grounds of most colleges was far more restricted than usual - again a unique class of worker the porters were employed to keep the Chinese tourists at bay. Everything was soaked in history and tradition that was of course slowly being washed away by the forces of progress. From the dining halls to the beautiful chapel you could just feel it drifting away from us. After all who is more motivated to maintain a beautiful chapel - a community of Christians who wish to be in that place or just absent minded caretakers eager to denounce their fathers?
Rowling’s dream, her fantasy seems to be marrying these two competing forces to an extent, but even she struggles. The story resolves itself relatively conservatively with the protagonists settling down to have children having brought and returned stability to their world. Voldemort and his ilk were destabilizers in the story, power seekers who disrupted the normal life. Things appear to progress much as before. There isn’t a revolution of the House Elves in the books, they are still rejecting of the freedom offered (again with the old ‘exception proves the rule’). So much for social justice or even decolonization.
Perhaps most telling in the whole Harry Potter saga is just how canceled she has still been for her views on transgenderism. She’s weirdly more right wing there than some pundits who circle the dissident right and are willing to call men women (Dutton, Academic Agent, etc). There was some TV retrospective with the cast about the films I saw recently she was uninvited from whilst the actors, like the good little communists they are, went along with it. That struck me as particularly crazy example. For all her money and her success she was still written out of her own story.
The last question becomes the most pertinent one - would I let my children read Harry Potter? I’m not interested in performative signaling here - if you’re reading this you likely slogged through my analysis of the right wing themes that are present. If I see them it is possible others do as well. Frankly it would require me to re-read the series but my gut says the books, at any rate, are less subversive than people think. It seems more likely the subversion arose from it coming of age alongside a highly ideological generation. People pull what they want from fiction - we are seeing the leftists do the same with Dune suddenly having its Hollywood moment. I guess the answer is perhaps. Turning our own critical analysis towards popular culture and pulling out what we value is something worth doing I believe. It cements our own worldview. It allows us to tell our own story rather than being passive passengers.
Interestingly she also incorporated a "bad house", something about the magical world needing bad people from time to time.
Must be something in the aether! I’ve been discussing Harry Potter a lot recently. People in our circles always have an opinion!