Well no surprise there, Harry was essentially a jock who only excelled in two things:
magical self defence
sports
And he was good enough in magical self defence that he took down the biggest baddest wizard with just the disarming spell. Literally a magical “put yer gun down”.
He could’ve gone into sports but hey, he just finished off the “big bad” shortly after he turned 18, so of course he’d chase that high. Especially when his girlfriend went into sports and they could hardly both play, that would be constant tension.
So yup, he went on to be a cop. And I see a lot of people claiming that ooh, the wizarding world is different, the police aren’t sent after innocent people, their justice system isn’t rigged, there’s no discrimination, yada yada… Hello??? Magical SAPIENT creatures are routinely enslaved, Dumbledore, someone people thought to be above reproach, was constantly accosted by the very same cops, Harry himself was accused and dragged into a kangaroo court over DEFENDING himself, the aurors have proven time after time that most of them are just as ineffective as the typical Murican doughnut-muncher mall cop, and about discrimination… “mudbloods” need a reminder? Or how Filch is treated?
The wizarding world is the last living remnant of the elitism of the British monarchy/nobility, and if you don’t see this, you lack practically all comprehensive reading skills. Put down those rose tinted glasses and read Harry Potter while paying attention to the social narrarive. It will open your eyes.
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 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.
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.
There’s no clear cut answer for that because there’s no absolute morality - and this is presented by the many issues raised with the entirety of the wizarding world Rowling built.
Take house elves for example. For us it’s obvious, they’re quasi slaves, and no amount of them saying they want this can alleviate the fact that wizards are enslaving an entire race just to make housework easier. We do see from e.g. the Weasleys that housework is trivial - an enchantment here, a spell there, and dishes clean themselves, clothes stay clean and well shaped (let it be ironing, pressing, etc.), pretty much the only unique, unreplicateable ability elves have is that they can apparate anywhere unrestricted.
And it’s not like many treat them well. Sure, the ones at Hogwarts are not abused, as far as we know. But look at the other examples. The Malfoys with Dobby, the Blacks with Kreacher, even the Crouches with their elves whose name I don’t remember… Just continuous abuse. Verbal, physical, emotional.
And it’s not like Harry or most of his idols are exceptions. The only people we see treat Kreacher well, are the Weasley parents, and Hermione. And by “treat well” I mean not abuse. Harry cusses him out in DH, and even throws shit at him, Ron too has some not exactly nice remarks, and don’t get me started on Sirius, the man who claims to have left behind his family’s “dark and evil” ways, treats Kreacher as if he was responsible for Sirius’ childhood trauma.
Or take the Goblins of Gringotts. Most wizards see them as necessary downside for a working financial system. Most wizards also don’t think they’re people.
Or literally any other sapient creature. Look how Firenze is treated in OoP by the students. He’s “just” a centaur, and even though Dumbledore names him a professor, the students don’t consider him an actual teacher. Harry and a few others are open minded enough, but most think of him as a talking horse (I think this name is actually said in the books).
So many creatures show not just sentience (aka the understanding of self, which most animals exhibit, alongside basic emotions that aren’t instinctual), but actual sapience - the ability to form coherent, complex thoughts and communicate those in some form - meaning they’re not just intelligent on the level of an animal, but at least as an equal to human intelligence and cognizance. And yet these creatures are treated as second class citizens, if they’re citizens at all and not just considered “wildlife”, making them property.
And while Harry might be “good” in the eye of the reader… He also doesn’t consider most of these creatures as equals. He fought for equality within the wizards, regardless of their birth status, where their magic comes from, or who their families are… but didn’t give a crap about the creatures, he was more than happy to preserve the status quo. He saw only one side of the injustice, fought against it, and won, proclaiming himself to be the good guy. While completely ignoring the more systemic injustices and in fact considering them perfectly okay.
To make a comparison with real world… imagine if the US civil war was fought over not slaves per se, but just the non-black slaves’ (so Asian, American indigenous, arab and Semitic, and what Americans considered “non-white” at the time like Spanish, Italian, Irish, Polish, etc. European immigrants) status, the Norrh saying “yeah slavery is fine up until this skin tone”.
To me this screams morally grey at best, because okay, Harry is directly opposing genocide… but on the other hand doesn’t give a crap about non-human members of the wizarding world, beyond “don’t kill them unnecessarily”. He doesn’t just don’t want to change the system - he doesn’t even see the issue with it!
Honestly the only morally positive person throughout the entire franchise was Newt Scamander from Fabtastic Beasts. Respectful towards all forms of life, no matter how sapient or not they are, always fighting for their betterment, protecting those who can’t defend themselves, and only fighting those who’d attack otherwise dedenceles creature.
I always found it real interesting how as soon as the Hitler parallel takes over the government and turns it into a fascist state that all of the magic cops just immediately do what he tells them to. They all line up and go along with it. No I don’t mention that for any particular reason…
Wasn’t his job trying to figure out how muggle stuff worked? With most wizards not even having a high school level comprehension of the basics of technology. Guys job was probably the most important of all given that technology advances exponentially and magic in the setting appears to be almost completely stagnant.
Nope. His job was mostly to mop up after careless wizards and witches that enchanted or cursed Muggle objects to behave… differently than intended.
His fascination with Muggle stuff was a completely personal thing, although most others disliked it. Which to me made little sense, wizards being so stuck up their own arse they completely ignore the Muggle world like they’re not part of it when the literally live around them.
Well no surprise there, Harry was essentially a jock who only excelled in two things:
And he was good enough in magical self defence that he took down the biggest baddest wizard with just the disarming spell. Literally a magical “put yer gun down”.
He could’ve gone into sports but hey, he just finished off the “big bad” shortly after he turned 18, so of course he’d chase that high. Especially when his girlfriend went into sports and they could hardly both play, that would be constant tension.
So yup, he went on to be a cop. And I see a lot of people claiming that ooh, the wizarding world is different, the police aren’t sent after innocent people, their justice system isn’t rigged, there’s no discrimination, yada yada… Hello??? Magical SAPIENT creatures are routinely enslaved, Dumbledore, someone people thought to be above reproach, was constantly accosted by the very same cops, Harry himself was accused and dragged into a kangaroo court over DEFENDING himself, the aurors have proven time after time that most of them are just as ineffective as the typical Murican doughnut-muncher mall cop, and about discrimination… “mudbloods” need a reminder? Or how Filch is treated?
The wizarding world is the last living remnant of the elitism of the British monarchy/nobility, and if you don’t see this, you lack practically all comprehensive reading skills. Put down those rose tinted glasses and read Harry Potter while paying attention to the social narrarive. It will open your eyes.
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 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.
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.
One concern seemingly nobody is discussing here is:
Is Harry a good person?
If so, and he’s good at the things you state (and especially if he’s only good at the things you state), why should he not be a cop?
There’s no clear cut answer for that because there’s no absolute morality - and this is presented by the many issues raised with the entirety of the wizarding world Rowling built.
Take house elves for example. For us it’s obvious, they’re quasi slaves, and no amount of them saying they want this can alleviate the fact that wizards are enslaving an entire race just to make housework easier. We do see from e.g. the Weasleys that housework is trivial - an enchantment here, a spell there, and dishes clean themselves, clothes stay clean and well shaped (let it be ironing, pressing, etc.), pretty much the only unique, unreplicateable ability elves have is that they can apparate anywhere unrestricted.
And it’s not like many treat them well. Sure, the ones at Hogwarts are not abused, as far as we know. But look at the other examples. The Malfoys with Dobby, the Blacks with Kreacher, even the Crouches with their elves whose name I don’t remember… Just continuous abuse. Verbal, physical, emotional.
And it’s not like Harry or most of his idols are exceptions. The only people we see treat Kreacher well, are the Weasley parents, and Hermione. And by “treat well” I mean not abuse. Harry cusses him out in DH, and even throws shit at him, Ron too has some not exactly nice remarks, and don’t get me started on Sirius, the man who claims to have left behind his family’s “dark and evil” ways, treats Kreacher as if he was responsible for Sirius’ childhood trauma.
Or take the Goblins of Gringotts. Most wizards see them as necessary downside for a working financial system. Most wizards also don’t think they’re people.
Or literally any other sapient creature. Look how Firenze is treated in OoP by the students. He’s “just” a centaur, and even though Dumbledore names him a professor, the students don’t consider him an actual teacher. Harry and a few others are open minded enough, but most think of him as a talking horse (I think this name is actually said in the books).
So many creatures show not just sentience (aka the understanding of self, which most animals exhibit, alongside basic emotions that aren’t instinctual), but actual sapience - the ability to form coherent, complex thoughts and communicate those in some form - meaning they’re not just intelligent on the level of an animal, but at least as an equal to human intelligence and cognizance. And yet these creatures are treated as second class citizens, if they’re citizens at all and not just considered “wildlife”, making them property.
And while Harry might be “good” in the eye of the reader… He also doesn’t consider most of these creatures as equals. He fought for equality within the wizards, regardless of their birth status, where their magic comes from, or who their families are… but didn’t give a crap about the creatures, he was more than happy to preserve the status quo. He saw only one side of the injustice, fought against it, and won, proclaiming himself to be the good guy. While completely ignoring the more systemic injustices and in fact considering them perfectly okay.
To make a comparison with real world… imagine if the US civil war was fought over not slaves per se, but just the non-black slaves’ (so Asian, American indigenous, arab and Semitic, and what Americans considered “non-white” at the time like Spanish, Italian, Irish, Polish, etc. European immigrants) status, the Norrh saying “yeah slavery is fine up until this skin tone”.
To me this screams morally grey at best, because okay, Harry is directly opposing genocide… but on the other hand doesn’t give a crap about non-human members of the wizarding world, beyond “don’t kill them unnecessarily”. He doesn’t just don’t want to change the system - he doesn’t even see the issue with it!
Honestly the only morally positive person throughout the entire franchise was Newt Scamander from Fabtastic Beasts. Respectful towards all forms of life, no matter how sapient or not they are, always fighting for their betterment, protecting those who can’t defend themselves, and only fighting those who’d attack otherwise dedenceles creature.
I always found it real interesting how as soon as the Hitler parallel takes over the government and turns it into a fascist state that all of the magic cops just immediately do what he tells them to. They all line up and go along with it. No I don’t mention that for any particular reason…
tbf there WAS a purge of aurors who supported Dumbledore and those who stayed with the Ministry did bail once Voldy took over.
Even Arthur Weasley, whose job was mostly irrelevant and minor, hightailed it out of there.
Wasn’t his job trying to figure out how muggle stuff worked? With most wizards not even having a high school level comprehension of the basics of technology. Guys job was probably the most important of all given that technology advances exponentially and magic in the setting appears to be almost completely stagnant.
Nope. His job was mostly to mop up after careless wizards and witches that enchanted or cursed Muggle objects to behave… differently than intended.
His fascination with Muggle stuff was a completely personal thing, although most others disliked it. Which to me made little sense, wizards being so stuck up their own arse they completely ignore the Muggle world like they’re not part of it when the literally live around them.
nah, he did the figuring out on his own time, and it was generally discouraged (from the context clues we are given)
His job was dealing with cursed Muggle items.
New copypasta dropped