What pisses me off is that you’re 100 % correct but most of it is unintentional on Rowling’s part. She’s a fascist reactionary and she just, for the most part, enthusiastically described her perfect little ideal society.
Everyone is in their place, the good guys work very hard to maintain the existing social order, and the people at the bottom are there because that is in their very nature and really they just like it that way and attempting to elevate them is futile. Textbook fascism and all of it is presented completely deadpan because this is Rowling’s genuine beliefs.
Hot take: HP’s popularity is responsible for more societal ills than pretty much any other book in print. Almost no-one engages with it critically even amongst the crowd that outwardly disagrees with Rowling’s more recent political activism. Fuuuuck that license.
I’m not sure that the outcome of Harry Potter is fascist in nature. After Voldemort is defeated there’s no mythic national rebirth, no driving nationalism, no cult of personality at the top, and the society doesn’t treat violence as virtue. What it looks like to me is more of a reactionary neoliberal, paternalist world. Hierarchy is enforced and treated as natural, change is looked at with suspicion, institutions are trusted, and the only problems come about when bad individuals are in charge of those institutions. This is essentially the worldview of 19th century imperialist Britain.
To be clear, though, fascism does exploit these weaknesses in liberal/neoliberal thought to bring itself about and does share some of the superficial look, but I think it flattens the term to label Harry Potter and/or JK Rowling as explicitly fascist. I think at best her work is neoliberal slop and that she has some abhorrent views about gender that people who are fascists would agree with.
The work itself is definitely a fascist pre-cursor. The whole “Wizarding society” thing is the mythical ethnostate from which everyone else must be excluded to avoid violence. That fact is so central to Rowling’s beliefs that it’s barely a theme in the books, just straight up a fundamental fact about the world barely worth commenting on. And even though HP is pretty sanitized wannabe liberal slop, she still manage to slip in some very racist stuff (slavery allegory about slaves being happy, “Cho Chang”, the Irish boy who constantly blows shit up, etc.).
I do believe that Rowling herself is not a very intelligent person (the quality of her writing is proof enough) and has incredible amounts of cognitive dissonance from trying to fit in with the liberals who made her successful, while holding some incredibly backwards view on many social topics. You’re right that she’s not a fascist per se, because she doesn’t have fascism’s consistent belief in self-ideology. At the same time much of her political activism has been so enabling to open fascists that it begs the question: does the label matter? Is the sheep who opens the gate to the wolf not, in its own way, a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Are U.S. Republicans not fascists just because they are more concerned about their own self-interest than any alliance to ideology?
I certainly agree that Harry Potter has fascist precursors within it, but that’s mostly my point: Neoliberalism itself is a fascist precursor in real life, or at least fascism easily exploits neoliberalism’s weaknesses. So to that end I think the labels do matter. For example, in theory it’s easier to right the ship and turn away from fascism or recognize its warning signs in a neoliberal society than in an actually fascist one. I.e. turning away from the path of fascism and towards a more egalitarian society might have been easier in 1990s America than it is now in a 2025 America. In much the same way no one thinks JK Rowling isn’t a huge bigot, no one could have reasonably claimed that 1990s America didn’t have its problems. Neither really fit the definition of fascism, although both lead to fascism.
I think the distinction is important because it hopefully makes it easier for imperfect, neoliberal places like Western Europe, Canada etc. that are having problems with rising right-wing movements to recognize problems before it becomes too late, rather than pointing out their weaknesses and jumping straight to a fascism label.
I don’t think even the shitty people engage with the HP books enough to take lessons on being a facist from it, the worst thing about those books is that it made a shitty human lots of money
No-one is immune from propaganda. And those awful books promote quite a few bad messages. Well firstly they promote criminally bad writing. But besides that, they work very hard to make a lot of oppressive power structures sound cool, whimsical, and aspiring to the uncritical reader. From the police institution to the prison complex to the famously abusive English boarding school system to the literal ethnostate to slavery somehow, and I haven’t gone over the half of it.
It truly feels like every other bit worldbuilding that Rowling put in sounds whimsical on the surface but makes you go “wait, the implications are truly terrible!” when you think about it for more than two seconds. Except she clearly did not think most of it through; she literally just thought “race of jewish caricatures who want nothing out of life besides being bankers” is good and whimsical worldbuilding… And somehow got away with it.
It’s impossible to quantify or prove but these books have had the most cultural impact out of any modern book franchise, and I don’t see how the systemic normalization of so many awful things to uncritical children and teenagers can balance out the joy and whimsy that people got out of them (especially when there is so much better written teen/YA fiction out there).
Shifting the Overton Window in the way that those books did is some insidious type shit that actually does matter quite a bit more than most people realize. New hot take: I think the bigots are correct to get big mad at Queer representation in media because it moves the Overton Window the other way and that actually impacts bigots long-term. In a very real sense a trans actor in a movie is a concrete and real step towards the de-legitimization of bigoted views. And HP is very much doing the opposite of that every time it touches on any kind of social subject.
What pisses me off is that you’re 100 % correct but most of it is unintentional on Rowling’s part. She’s a fascist reactionary and she just, for the most part, enthusiastically described her perfect little ideal society.
Everyone is in their place, the good guys work very hard to maintain the existing social order, and the people at the bottom are there because that is in their very nature and really they just like it that way and attempting to elevate them is futile. Textbook fascism and all of it is presented completely deadpan because this is Rowling’s genuine beliefs.
Hot take: HP’s popularity is responsible for more societal ills than pretty much any other book in print. Almost no-one engages with it critically even amongst the crowd that outwardly disagrees with Rowling’s more recent political activism. Fuuuuck that license.
I’d say the bible ranks higher. But as an admitted “hot take,” I can respect that.
I’m not sure that the outcome of Harry Potter is fascist in nature. After Voldemort is defeated there’s no mythic national rebirth, no driving nationalism, no cult of personality at the top, and the society doesn’t treat violence as virtue. What it looks like to me is more of a reactionary neoliberal, paternalist world. Hierarchy is enforced and treated as natural, change is looked at with suspicion, institutions are trusted, and the only problems come about when bad individuals are in charge of those institutions. This is essentially the worldview of 19th century imperialist Britain.
To be clear, though, fascism does exploit these weaknesses in liberal/neoliberal thought to bring itself about and does share some of the superficial look, but I think it flattens the term to label Harry Potter and/or JK Rowling as explicitly fascist. I think at best her work is neoliberal slop and that she has some abhorrent views about gender that people who are fascists would agree with.
The work itself is definitely a fascist pre-cursor. The whole “Wizarding society” thing is the mythical ethnostate from which everyone else must be excluded to avoid violence. That fact is so central to Rowling’s beliefs that it’s barely a theme in the books, just straight up a fundamental fact about the world barely worth commenting on. And even though HP is pretty sanitized wannabe liberal slop, she still manage to slip in some very racist stuff (slavery allegory about slaves being happy, “Cho Chang”, the Irish boy who constantly blows shit up, etc.).
I do believe that Rowling herself is not a very intelligent person (the quality of her writing is proof enough) and has incredible amounts of cognitive dissonance from trying to fit in with the liberals who made her successful, while holding some incredibly backwards view on many social topics. You’re right that she’s not a fascist per se, because she doesn’t have fascism’s consistent belief in self-ideology. At the same time much of her political activism has been so enabling to open fascists that it begs the question: does the label matter? Is the sheep who opens the gate to the wolf not, in its own way, a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Are U.S. Republicans not fascists just because they are more concerned about their own self-interest than any alliance to ideology?
I certainly agree that Harry Potter has fascist precursors within it, but that’s mostly my point: Neoliberalism itself is a fascist precursor in real life, or at least fascism easily exploits neoliberalism’s weaknesses. So to that end I think the labels do matter. For example, in theory it’s easier to right the ship and turn away from fascism or recognize its warning signs in a neoliberal society than in an actually fascist one. I.e. turning away from the path of fascism and towards a more egalitarian society might have been easier in 1990s America than it is now in a 2025 America. In much the same way no one thinks JK Rowling isn’t a huge bigot, no one could have reasonably claimed that 1990s America didn’t have its problems. Neither really fit the definition of fascism, although both lead to fascism.
I think the distinction is important because it hopefully makes it easier for imperfect, neoliberal places like Western Europe, Canada etc. that are having problems with rising right-wing movements to recognize problems before it becomes too late, rather than pointing out their weaknesses and jumping straight to a fascism label.
I don’t think even the shitty people engage with the HP books enough to take lessons on being a facist from it, the worst thing about those books is that it made a shitty human lots of money
No-one is immune from propaganda. And those awful books promote quite a few bad messages. Well firstly they promote criminally bad writing. But besides that, they work very hard to make a lot of oppressive power structures sound cool, whimsical, and aspiring to the uncritical reader. From the police institution to the prison complex to the famously abusive English boarding school system to the literal ethnostate to slavery somehow, and I haven’t gone over the half of it.
It truly feels like every other bit worldbuilding that Rowling put in sounds whimsical on the surface but makes you go “wait, the implications are truly terrible!” when you think about it for more than two seconds. Except she clearly did not think most of it through; she literally just thought “race of jewish caricatures who want nothing out of life besides being bankers” is good and whimsical worldbuilding… And somehow got away with it.
It’s impossible to quantify or prove but these books have had the most cultural impact out of any modern book franchise, and I don’t see how the systemic normalization of so many awful things to uncritical children and teenagers can balance out the joy and whimsy that people got out of them (especially when there is so much better written teen/YA fiction out there).
Shifting the Overton Window in the way that those books did is some insidious type shit that actually does matter quite a bit more than most people realize. New hot take: I think the bigots are correct to get big mad at Queer representation in media because it moves the Overton Window the other way and that actually impacts bigots long-term. In a very real sense a trans actor in a movie is a concrete and real step towards the de-legitimization of bigoted views. And HP is very much doing the opposite of that every time it touches on any kind of social subject.