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Wednesday
Pundit Cliff Schechter recently posted a video exploring why the Republican Party has become “so dysfunctional, so self-destructive, so downright crazy.” At present, the craziness is most on display in the House of Representatives and concerns the position of Speaker. Not only is the GOP, although in the majority, currently unable to choose someone to fill the position, but the position has been unstable for quite some time. Contrast that with the Democrats, who for years had a steady hand at the tiller in Nancy Pelosi.
While some might seek to blame the GOP’s current struggles on the intense polarization between rightwing and extreme rightwing members, along with a tiny majority that gives any small group of Representatives effective veto power, Schechter has another explanation: The position of Speaker, when occupied by a Republican, has been cursed by dark magic.
Schechter has in mind the curse that Voldemort in the Harry Potter books lays on the position of instructor of Defense against the Dark Arts. Dumbledore believes that when Voldemort, as Tom Riddle, was initially denied the position, he cursed it so that no one could hold the post for longer than a year.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is the Dark Wizard in Schechter’s scenario. Like Voldemort, Gingrich was “something of a dark arts genius.” He rose to power in the early 1990s practicing a “new cutthroat, extreme brand of politics.” Gingrich was the first to realize that
being as extreme and bare knuckled as possible could be politically successful. Because of the decline of traditional media and the rise of rightwing media, you didn’t have to play the middle anymore. You just had to keep feeding your base a toxic brew to keep them angry.
Although initially successful, Gingrich brought about his own destruction. Caught up in a massive ego trip, he overreached, shutting down the government and undermining Republican reelection chances by conducting ridiculous impeachment hearings against Clinton for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He finally had to resign when he was caught using campaign contributions for private ends. As Schechter points out, he “Avada Kedavraed himself.”
Avada Kedavra, as Harry Potter fans know well, is the killing curse that works instantaneously. We see Voldemort directly use it twice and each time it rebounds upon himself. In the first instance, it bounces off the love that Lily Potter is using to shield her infant son (although it kills her), disintegrating Voldemort’s body. That Gingrich went on to become a shadow of his former self is clear to anyone who has been following politics since his heyday.
The second time occurs in the final showdown with Harry:
“Avada Kedavra!”
“Expelliarmus!”
The bang was like a cannon blast, and the golden flames that erupted between them, at the dead center of the circle they had been treading, marked the point where the spells collided. Harry saw Voldemort’s green jet meet his own spell…Voldemort fell backward, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upward. Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse…
Throughout the books, Voldemort’s disembodied state doesn’t prevent him from wielding power over the Dark Arts position. (In this way he’s unlike Gingrich.) Schechter compares the first professor, Quirinus Quirrell, to Dennis Hastert, the former speaker who went to prison for abusing teenage boys. The disembodied Voldemort has possessed Quirrell, feeding off him while concealed in his turban and seeking to get him to steal the immortality-granting Philosopher’s Stone. Both Quirrell and Hastert, Schechter says, are men with two faces, “mild mannered on the surface, total evil behind it.”
With the exception of Snape and the werewolf Lupin, all the subsequent Defense against the Dark Arts professors are either bad, incompetent, or both:
Gilderoy Lockhart
Bartemius Crouch Jr (in the guise of Mad-Eye Moody)
Dolores Umbridge
Amycus Carrow
The same has been true of the GOP House Speakers following Gingrich and Hastert. First there was Tom Delay, who was sentenced to three years in prison for his connection with a corrupt lobbyist. He was followed by John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, each forced out by extremists in the party. The two most recent candidates for the position, Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, have their own connections with dark forces. Jordan, described by Boehner as a “legislative terrorist” who just wants to burn everything down, overlooked sexual abuse of wrestlers while an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State and then, in 2020, actively aided Trump in his coup attempt. Scalise, meanwhile, has ties to White Nationalists and once described himself as a “David Duke without the baggage,” Duke being the former head of the KKK.
At the end of the final Harry Potter book, we see life returning to normal. Harry, Hermione and Ron have survived seven years of chaos—which is how long it has been since Trump was elected president—and we see them, years later, grown up and taking their own kids to school. Many of us long for a world in which Trumpian Death Eaters aren’t dictating the national agenda.
Added note: While he is not in the House, one can find resemblances between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Amycus Carrow, the final Dark Arts professor who is doing incalculable damage to the school he’s in charge of. In his dictatorial regime, Carrow encourages his preferred students to perform the excruciatingly painful Cruciatus Curse—whose use has previously been outlawed—on those who have earned detentions. For his part, DeSantis has gutted the highly regarded New College and has been taking shots at university inclusion and diversity programs, not to mention high school readings lists and curriculums.
In fact, now that I think about it, DeSantis’s revisionary history, which views slavery as internship training for backward Africans, resembles the “Muggles Studies” course that Carrow’s sister teaches. Neville Longbottom describes the course that all Hogwarts students are now compelled to take:
We’ve all got to listen to her 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.