Tuesday
MSNOW legal commentator Barbara McQuade, the Michigan lawyer fired by DJT after successfully prosecuting the underwear bomber and a Detroit mayor, has just published The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. In her interview about the book with Rachel Maddow, McQuade used a literary analogy to succinctly sum up what has happened to Trump’s Department of “Justice”: “The Death Eaters have taken over the Ministry of Magic.”
The allusion, of course, is to the final book in the Harry Potter series and captures how dire our situation has become. The Ministry of Magic is the governing body for the magical community, and while frequently inept and sometimes corrupt, it nevertheless provides some protection against the forces of evil. Harry, Dumbledore, and Hogwarts can wrestle with their immediate challenges without worrying about Voldemort seizing executive authority. Even Vernon Dursley, upon suddenly finding his family pulled into the wizards’ war, shares this view:
“I thought there was a Ministry of Magic?” asked Vernon Dursley abruptly.
“There is,” said Harry, surprised.
“Well then, why can’t they protect us? It seems to me that, as innocent victims, guilty of nothing more than harboring a marked man, we ought to qualify for government protection!”
Harry laughed: he could not help himself. It was so very typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the establishment, even within this world that he despised and mistrusted.
“You heard what Mr. Weasley and Kingsley said,” Harry replied. “We think the Ministry has been infiltrated.”
And so in fact it has. We learn in the opening chapter of Deathly Hallows that a Voldemort henchman has placed an Imperius Curse on Pius Thicknesse, the Ministry’s Head of the Department of Magical Law, thereby making him Voldemort’s puppet. The goal, now, is for Thicknesse to convert other ministers so that they can overthrow Minister Rufus Scrimgeour. Voldemort warns that the coup must be successful as “one failed attempt on the Minister’s life will set me back a long way.”
The signs of infiltration have been there for a while as Harry, the Weasleys, and others see Voldemort making inroads. “Harry,” Hermione says at one point as his scar begins giving him visions of Voldemort, “he’s taking over the Ministry and the newspapers and half the Wizarding world! Don’t let him inside your head too!” Still, the news comes as a thunderbolt, akin to America’s election night news on November 8, 2016 and again November 5, 2024: “The Ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming.”
Having already lost Dumbledore, now Harry, Hermione, and Ron have lost the protection of Hogwarts and are on their own as Voldemort seizes the instruments of governing. Putting it in our own terms, he now controls Congress, the judiciary, the media, and the military. Because Trump has made significant inroads into all four, we can relate to what life is like under Voldemort, which we learn when Neville reports on life at Hogwarts.
First of all, he tells them about Death Eaters who have joined the faculty. We can think of the Carrows as ICE agents with free use of the detention system:
The other teachers are all supposed to refer us to the Carrows if we do anything wrong….We supposed to practice the Cruciatus Curse on people who’ve earned detentions.
While Neville sustains a deep gash in his cheek for refusing to do so, the Carrows, like the Department of Homeland Security, find willing accomplices. “Some people are into it,” Neville notes. “Crabbe and Goyle love it. First time they’ve ever been top in anything, I expect.”
Like many school systems in the American south, Hogwarts has also changed its curriculum, with “Defense Against the Dark Arts” becoming “the Dark Arts.” Meanwhile, now that the school is no longer constrained by DEI, Critical Race Theory, or Black History Month, Muggle Studies (i.e., the study of humans) is taught in a whole new way:
“We’ve all got to listen to [the teacher] explain how Muggles are like animals, stupid and dirty, and how they drove wizards into hiding by being vicious toward them, and how the natural order is being reestablished. I got this one,” [Neville] indicated another slash to his face, “for asking her how much Muggle blood she and her brother have got.”
When Ron worries that Neville is taking unnecessary chances, he replies with words that we’re hearing these days from protest leaders: “The thing is, it helps when people stand up to them, it gives everyone hope. I used to notice that when you did it, Harry.”
The Death Eaters even have a version of going after the immigrant parents of American citizens. Neville again:
The only people in real danger are the ones whose friends and relatives on the outside are giving trouble. They get taken hostage. Old Xeno Lovegood was getting a bit too outspoken in The Quibbler, so they dragged Luna off the train on the way back from Christmas.
For a while, the Hogwarts rebels resort to graffiti until it becomes too dangerous. “We used to sneak out at night and put graffiti on the walls: Dumbledore’s Army, Still Recruiting, stuff like that.” Now, they are in hiding, awaiting the best moment to strike.
For years the American right has had fever dreams about a leftwing takeover, making movies like Red Dawn, complaining incessantly about big government, and pushing for increased accessibility to firearms. Who knew that, when they themselves took over, they would engage in wholesale roundups of brown people, extrajudicial killings without accountability, and a black helicopter attack on a Chicago tenement? The left may have “policed” racially insensitive speech, but “police” for them was only a metaphor, not actual militias with access to lethal weapons, pepper spray, armored vehicles, extrajudicial warrants, and virtually unlimited power to arrest, detain indefinitely, and sometimes send to foreign prisons.
So yes, the Death Eaters have taken over the Ministry of Magic. But we can share Neville’s hope that resistance isn’t altogether futile and Rowling’s vision that Harry’s non-violent response to Voldemort will triumph in the end. The weapon that the Dark Lord hurls at Harry rebounds upon him so that he is brought down by his own machinations.
For that to happen, however, Harry must enter the dark wood and stand up to him. The King’s Cross episode shows Harry wrestling with his doubts—when all seems lost, should he continue on?—and his decision to return to action is the decision before us all. As the ghost of Dumbledore tells him in this netherworld,
By returning, you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart. If that seems to you a worthy goal, then we say good-bye for the present.
In this moment, Potter also discovers that behind the face of evil is an unloved, whimpering toddler. Or put another way, the Great and Powerful Oz is a little man behind a curtain, even if his face and name are plastered all over Washington.
Keep the faith.
