J.K. ROWLING AND FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER

People find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right. -- Albus Dumbledore

To see an almost universally beloved figure tumble from grace is one of the most fascinating and pathetic spectacles life offers. There is an air of Shakespearian or even Greek-level tragedy in a downfall story, even if one happens to believe the downfall justified.

I don't think anyone would argue that J.K. Rowling has actually fallen. She has not necessarily even stumbled. When one has already crossed the finish line and taken the trophy cup, it is arguable if controveries ex post facto even matter. After all, the HARRY POTTER series sold over over 500 million copies. The films made from those books grossed 7.7 billion dollars. The authorized merchandise has sold $15 billion. He own personal worth is quoted as £820 million, making her, by American standards, effectively a billionaire -- and she could certainly be a billionaire, even in British pounds, if she didn't give so much money to charity. Perhaps most importantly, she retains enormous legions of devoted fans, people who grew up with her works and to whom the universe of Harry Potter is as important as STAR WARS, STAR TREK, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, or any other fictive universe in which it is possible to immerse oneself completely and forget "real life" even exists.

It is nevertheless true that Rowling's public image has been tarnished, deliberately and willfully, and her reputation in certain quarters diminished or destroyed as a consequence. The once-adoring, even sniveling way the media deals with her has given way to a barely concealed hostility. She is often identified in the first few lines of any article as a bigot, someone who is against trans rights, someone who betrayed her own feminism and alienated her adoring fans by revealing hidden prejudices. Few "journalists" writing about Rowling nowadays even bother with the pretense of objectivity: you would think her a polarizing political figure who'd happened, sometime in the distance past, to pen a few goodish potboilers, rather than one of the most influential writers of the modern era who has also given vast sums to charitable causes and championed the cause of feminism, but holds some slightly deviationist opinions about a tiny, fractious fraction of the population.

A few years ago this would have been unthinkable. Rowling hit almost every note possible on the "improbable success scale." A single mother living on the dole, almost penniless, without any seeming aptitude for writing, somehow rose in a short period to international mega-fame and entered the hallowed halls of authors who will go down in literary history not for their financial success, but for the degree to which they influenced the world around them: unlike E.L. James or Stephanie Myers, who put up huge numbers and also had lucrative movie tie-ins, Rowling's work has actual, cultural resonance. When I describe my graduate school as "looking like Hogwarts," I do not need to further explain myself: the image comes ready-made even to those who never saw the movies or read the books. Likewise, when I say someone "looks like Harry Potter" or "has all the charm of Lord Voldemort," no one is going to scratch their heads at the obscurity of the reference. Like Stephen King before her, Rowling's contributions to our vernacular are permanent.

The tarnishment -- some might say vandalism -- of Rowling's public image began with her sarcastic reply to an op-ed piece which referred to women as “people who menstruate." In this day and age, when vocabulary at large is being bent and beaten into vaguely Orwellian shapes to soothe the easily-ruffled feathers of a certain section of our political demographic, the idea that "women" as a word should yield to "people who menstruate" is not really a surprising one. Nevertheless, there are many who object to this sort of nonsense and Rowling is one of them. The reply she wrote on Twitter -- "I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” -- caused an immediate online furor, and when Rowling clarified her position later on, explaining that she supported trans people but that "sex is real" -- it only added fuel to this rather bizarre fire. The reaction among the Hollywood crowd, amateur activisits, and the intellectual Left was immediate and violent. A number of HARRY POTTER cast members, people who owed their entire livelihoods to her existence, turned on her with a speed that would have astonished Satan, a fairly accomplished betrayer himself. (One book reseller actually removed Rowling's name from the covers of her own novels, another touch Orwell would have found familiar.) And this backlash, far from exhausting itself quickly, has only strengthened over time. A few months ago, an open world video game called "Hogwarts Legacy" was released by Warner Bros. Software. Although Rowling had nothing whatever to do with the development of the game, she recieves royalties for it, and this, along with the fact the name "Harry Potter" was attached to it, was sufficient cause for "activists" to organize a boycott. This went as far as creating a website which would identify and publicize the name of anyone who actually purchased the game, a clear attempt at intimidation (a more and more common feature of "trans activism" nowadays). The boycott was a miserable failure, "Hogwarts Legacy" grossed over a billion dollars and received astonishingly high reviews on Steam (9/10), but the fact it was attempted, and the means by which its organizers were willing to try and carry it out, showed that Rowling's haters are not going anywhere. And the press has clearly taken the side of those haters by ensuring that any mention of her name is immediately accompanied by her "anti-trans positions."

Regardless of where one might sit on this issue, or whether one even takes a seat at all, the situation is fascinating. It is fascinating because it brings a much larger political-societal issue into specific relief, specifically the growing and increasingly bitter divide between the liberal and the progressive.

When one looks at what is broadly referred to as "The Left," it is important to understand that we are covering a great deal of political ground. The center-leftist, the liberal, and the progressive are all on one side of the political spectrum, but are hardly peas in a pod. Rowling is, of course, a self-admitted liberal. Now, "liberalism" in Europe is, of course, somewhat further to the left than American liberalism, or even Canadian liberalism (Canadians will please forgive me for implying they are not Americans too, it's just more wieldly to write "American" than "liberalism in the United States"), but suffice to say that liberals everywhere are in sympathy if not necessarily in agreement with each other.

What is liberalism, you ask? Before we can answer that we must briefly address the Left as a whole. If we start "just left of center," we find a person who, in the United States, votes Democratic but may have opinions on things like national defense or social issues such as welfare, immigration, gun control, abortion, etc. which are more in keeping with right-wing thought. They tend toward social conservatism in practice if not in expressed sympathy: they may be all for you to have dyed purple hair, a bone through your nose and an invented pronoun, but they woudn't want such a person in their house or their family. They are not overly political beings and do not obsess over politics. They believe they stand for decency and common sense, and radical ideas make them uncomfortable even if they feel pressured to express sympathy for them. They may want to see change on specific issues, but essentially stand for the status quo.

Liberalism is a more active form of leftism, touched in places by Marxist thought but not actually Marxist. Liberals have strong beliefs about what they refer to as social justice. Their sympathies are with the poor, the marginalized, the downtrodden. They are deeply discontented with the status quo and feel that society needs extensive change in order to become more equitable and just, and that many of our social, economic, and political institutions need a radical overhaul. A liberal is more likely to make their politics part of their daily identity, and to choose their friendships and romantic attachments based on political alignment. However -- and this is a key point -- liberals, like center-leftists, are generally quite comfortable in the world as it is. I don't mean they are comfortable with it: I mean they are comfortable in it. Though their beliefs are sincerely held, the insult often levied at them -- that they are "parlor Bolsheviks," people who cry for radical change from the ease of their middle or upper-middle class lifestyles, who decry "the system" while directly benefiting from its supposed injustices -- is not specious. Orwell himself, an avowed Social Democrat and a devotee of Marx, was the first to point out that many on the Left spent their lives complaining bitterly about things they really did not wish to change. A person who is genuinely upset about social inequality, racism, police brutality, etc., but is upset from the comfort of his suburban living room in his all-white, crime-free neighborhood; someone who wants "radical change" without actually wanting the consequences of it to his or her own lifestyle, and without necessarily seeing the inherent irony of these positions...this would be an uncharitable and incomplete, but not necessarily wrong, view of the liberal. On the other hand, the liberal is broad-minded when it comes to arguing points of doctrine with other liberals, and can do this without rancor and indeed, often with a relish for the clash of sincerley-held ideas. There is more than a touch of middle-class sensibilities in many liberals.

A progressive is on the further end of the leftist spectrum, in the Marxian realm. A progressive is someone who wants radical change to "the system" and wants to see it happen in their lifetime, and more than that, they want to help make it happen, sooner rather than later. A progressive has the courage of their convictions in that they are generally willing to endure (or at least believe they are willing to endure) all unpleasantness and suffering that comes with activism. They are also willing to shed middle-class/bourgeois notions of civility, politeness and decency to see their agendas carried out. Since they regard "the system" (the courts, the ballot box) as rigged, they tolerate it only when it rules in their favor, and tend to accept government as legitimate only when it falls on their side of an issue. Unlike liberals, who generally eschew violence if not confrontation, progressives have a violent streak in them -- violent not only in terms of rhetoric, but sometimes, in terms of action. Indeed, the hyperbolic rhetoric favored by progressives -- equating buying a video game with genocide, for example -- is a form of violence, since in effect that is what it encourages. And like all Marxists, be they avowed or in spirit, they are incredibly intolerant of disagreement within their own ranks. We will come back to this crucial point in a moment.

Now, these are only my incomplete, prejudiced, and too broadly-painted, definitions, but they will do for today's purposes, because it is impossible to understand the tarnishment and vandalism of Rowling, and its real-life importance, without understanding the role in which liberals have played in their own downfall, their own descent into powerlessness and irrelevancy. In a sense, and not surprisingly, it began in the halls of academia.

As long as a hundred years ago or more, it had become evident that universities in the Western world were a breeding-ground for left-wing thought. Orwell commented on this at great length in various essays, making his infamous crack about "professors who got their crockery in Paris and their ideas from Moscow." At the time, the ideas of Marx had great currency in many universities, appealing to the academic class in large part because, theoretically anyway, they stood to gain the most by a widespread acceptance of Marxist ideas. Marxism was, at its core, a movement meant to put the intelligencia in charge of society. However, because communism per se never took power in any major Western state, Marxism continued to exist only as an intellectual idea, sealed off from the great masses by ivy-covered university walls. It was all theory and no practice. Modern Western liberalism was at best a severely watered-down version of it, one which existed within the traditional societal framework, and still paid emotional homage to middle-class sensibilities and the status quo. However, as the decades passed, the intellectual and emotional influences of liberal professors on their students increased. The generation born in the 40s and 50s, who opposed the Vietnam war and fought for civil rights as young men and women, became the college professors of the 1980s and 1990s. They cut their hair and traded Nehru jackets for academic tweed, but they did not forget their ideals. Collectively, if unconsciously, they sought -- at the least -- to "open up" the minds of the youth to leftist or Marxist-style thinking, and at most, to breed a generation who would finish the work they had started, and which had been so rudely interrupted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. And broadly speaking, they were successful, but in a curiously ironic way.

In 2015, Professor Edward Schlosser wrote a now-famous essay for Vox entitled: "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me." He lamented that campuses had become fear-filled environments in which the goal was no longer education but a "safe" environment in which students' beliefs and prejudices would be protected rather than challenged. Schlosser painted a picture of a campus in which curriculums had been redesigned to be as bland, inoffensive, and politically correct as possible, so as not to upset students with ideas or concepts which would make them uncomfortable. Schlosser summed up his essay by writing that "the real problem (is) a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice."

It's worth noting -- and Professor Schlosser does not -- that this problem, like Frankenstein's monster, did not self-create. It was the inevitable end result of teaching an aggressively intolerant ideology to young and impressionable minds, to wit: that feelings matter more than facts, and that beliefs can take the place of logic, and that all right reposes in one set of ideological beliefs. The liberal professors of the 70s, 80s and 90s created the progressive students of today, as surely as Dr. Frankestein painstakingly pieced together the abomination in his lab. They did so, presumably, with the best of intentions (or at least with understandable intentions), but they did so either without grasping, or without caring about, the dangers inherent in the project. And this, too, is classical Marxist thinking. Both Lenin and Trotsky freely admitted, when they took power in Russia a hundred years ago, that they had no idea what the end result of their social, agricultural economic policies would be. The whole thing was an experiment conducted with the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and if some millions happened to die in the process, well, as Lenin said, "you can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs." And it's worth noting that many of the "eggs" ultimately broken were loyal Marxists who simply deviated with Lenin on this or that specific issue.

I am not, of course, equating progressives with the mass-murdering Lenin and his gang. I am simply pointing out that they share a common ideological wellspring, as well as a common incapacity to understand the limitations of that ideology -- its inherent contradictions, and its tendencies toward authoritarianism, extremism and intolerance...as well as its built-in need to become more radical over time, and to smash opposing lines of thought.

J.K. Rowling is an avowed liberal by her own lights. She probably even identifies as a progressive on some if not many issues. Until very recently she was the darling of many a media outlet for these reasons -- admittedly, among many others. But she dared to deviate from the most radical of progressives on a single issue, and for this she has been "canceled" -- not altogether successfully, but with sufficient vigor that her standing has been badly tarnished. And quite tellingly, not only has the left-leaning side of the press facilitated this attack, many who are not radically progressive but who still identify as "left" have been reluctant, or unwilling, to come to her defense. The ordinary person who leans somwhere on that side of the political spectrum is leery of being seen as "anti-trans," and thus stands idly by while someone they once admired and idolized is rubbished and threatened. The climate of fear that Professor Schlosser wrote about in 2015 is hardly limited to campuses now that the monster has risen from the table in the laboratory and escaped: it is everywhere political discourse exists.

I believe Rowling's present situation is important because it contains within it a foretaste of what will happen to "centrist" or "establishment" politics if those in charge of same do not push back against this inreasing militancy, this tendency to pander to a gang of destructive radicals, some of whom are only dubiously sane. Those on the left like to quip, "It's a big tent" when they speak of the broad appeal of their political brand. This image, however, is illustrative of the problem: tents are for circuses, and no circus should be run by its clowns.