THERE'S A RICH TEXT TO BE WRITTEN ABOUT A MUGGLE REVOLT AGAINST THE WIZARDS:

The wizarding world in Harry Potter is not a harmonious society invaded by evil from the outside; we soon learn that it is a society already full of injustice. Wizarding rule looks natural to the wizards, but Rowling leaves no doubt that it is not. Wizards forbid non-humans to carry wands, drive Centaurs from their lands, abuse their House-elves, and shun werewolves. Many are suspicious of Muggle-borns.

Of course, the main story is not one of moral ambiguities. Gryffindors know evil when they see it. But the good guys are not completely off the hook here: Sirius is a bully to his House-elf, and the main characters themselves respond differently to oppressive institutions. Ron has himself been raised with some of the ideological biases of the wizarding class - House-elves are natural slaves, and goblins are not to be trusted. Hermione, more woke, explicitly calls him out on these opinions, saying that "it's people like you [...] who prop up rotten and unjust systems" (GoF 106).

Nor is this a mere side-motif or parody. For one, the story time and again invokes the racism of the bad guys as a plot point: crucial blows to the dark side are dealt by creatures they deem beneath their attention. Harry's natural inclusive attitude is a strength closely wound up with the virtues of love and loyalty that he embodies; it is why he can win in spite of Voldemort having more magical knowledge and power.

Second, it is not just Hermione who believes in connections between different forms of oppression. When Voldemort rises to power, all pre-existing fault lines come into sharper view. There is a class that can opt out of the struggle, and it is the class already in power: all wizard-born wizards (except Harry). The death eaters' terror lands on those groups and creatures that had been marginalized and stigmatized before - it just becomes worse:

"'It doesn't matter', said Harry [...] 'This isn't about wizards versus goblins or any other sort of magical creature -'

Griphook gave a nasty laugh.

'But it is, it is about precisely that! As the Dark Lord becomes ever more powerful, your race is set still more firmly above mine! Gringotts falls under wizarding rule, house-elves are slaughtered, and who amongst the wand-carriers protests?'" (DH 395)

Rhetorical strategies wizards use to justify oppression and exclusion often resonate with mechanisms familiar to our own world. The bigots in the book usually spout recognizably right-wing language, glorifying strength and self-interest ('Magic is Might'), or appealing to the natural order. A movie line, where a minister working for Voldemort promises to "restore this temple of tolerance to its former glory", sums up well the political dimension of the final book of the series. The English Wizarding world, Rowling shows, is a society that has not shaken off the darkest pages of its history; whose leaders willfully refuse to believe that the roots of this darkness persist; and which is all the more vulnerable for it. It is ripe for the taking.

I am aware that Harry Potter is not a textbook of political science. I also think, however, that the moves Voldemort happens to make in order to gain power were put there by an author with a good sense of where the vulnerabilities of our own societies lay. I mean playing on the perceived self-interests of a dominant caste that feels it is being unduly restrained in its exploitation of the less powerful. Rowling 'warned' us, in the early 2000s, that a narcissistic, cruel and petty bully could hijack the system by manipulating the resentment of a significant reactionary minority.

But indeed, it is not the main story. The story of Harry and Voldemort is not political, but moral, existential. It is about how self-love and fear of death can shut you off from humanity, and turn you to evil; and how altruism, empathy, self-sacrifice and love can keep you grounded, can attach you to other people and thereby help you to face death.

"Dumbledore says it's our fault"

It is here that we find another, more subtle aspect to the cultural politics of the series. In a gigantic literary parable like this, moral categories easily slide into natural categories. What I mean is this: the Harry Potter series is a story first. The world is malleable to this story, and Rowling is often willing to compromise on the internal logic of the magic system if by doing so she can add a layer of meaning to a character. She does what the story needs. But in order for the story to get off the ground, some things have to be true about the magical world not metaphorically, but literally. Dementors literally feed on happiness. Killing literally rips the soul apart.

In the magical world, virtues and values draw their force not just from human assent, but from objects - mirrors know what your deepest desires are, and hats and swords know whether you are worthy of them. There is a conservative streak to such naturalism: the reification of aspects of our lived experience into magical creatures and objects elevates some social facts to natural facts (-in-the-narrative), and not others. A mother's sacrifice provided real magical protection; a father's sacrifice did not.

Diversity in the wizarding world has an objective element. With the exception of the distinction between wizard- and Muggle-born wizards, which is consistently presented as false and baseless by all reliable characters, stereotypes in the magical world often extend to different species. This means that the magical world presents a much more genuine challenge to political solidarity than does the human world: elves, trolls and giants have intelligence and language, but they also seem different from humans. In some cases, they are less intelligent - if you overload giants with information, they will, as Hagrid puts it, "kill yeh jus' to simplify things" (OP 380). In some cases, as with the centaurs, their classification as creatures with "near-human intelligence"  (OP 665) seems to be another instrument of oppression. The giants' reputation for aggression can be read as a fault of the social system as much as it can be read into their nature:

"They're not made ter live bunched up together like tha'. Dumbledore says it's our fault, it was the wizards who forced 'em to go an' made 'em live a good long way from us an' they had no choice bu' ter stick together fer their own protection." (OP 378)

The politics of diversity in Harry Potter is complicated, and its translation to the real world is problematic. Rowling seems to present a world in which, though many beliefs held by the ruling class are self-serving and based on misinformation, there may also be natural differences between groups. These differences, however, do not determine what the social order ought to look like. Ways of dealing with differences are contested, and even Dumbledore was once tempted by the idea that wizards had a natural right to rule. Harry, on the other hand, does not see werewolves, goblins or elves, but sees every individual as a potential friend. The books present this attitude as the right one, but also as an exceptional one.

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