In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, all of the hardcore inner-circle followers of Voldemort, the so-called Death Eaters, have a permanent brand on their left forearm, the Dark Mark. It serves as a perverse badge of honor and a way for Voldy to summon them to him quickly, or vice versa.
All the DE are second-rate henchmen at best, of course; Harry and a bunch of kids defeat their entire lineup in book five, and they only start racking up kills at the end when Voldy was right there with them at the height of his power. Not much more than vanilla stormtroopers talking trash while Vader does the carving. Ron’s mom took out Lestrange by herself, and without Voldy as a foci for their pettiness, they collapsed. Survivors got a date with the Dementors; the Malfoys turned, as the most inept and cowardly of the bunch, and were pardoned.
But the Marks remained, even just as a scar that no longer burned.
I imagine it made for some awkward conversations in public, assuming they ventured out at all after the war. Did Draco Malfoy simply deny if asked that he was once a Death Eater? Maybe he just stuck to long-sleeved shirts? Perhaps he simply hung out with his former toadies and moaned about the good old days. Or he turned a new leaf and stopped being an ass. But even without permanent physical proof of his sworn loyalty to the Dark Lord, I’d think it would be the first thing on anyone’s mind when interacting with him. A lifetime of benign philanthropy would help, of course, but he’d always be the ineffectual bully who agreed to kill Dumbledore, even if he ultimately refused and his family cruelly manipulated him.
The election is what made me think of this.
Imagine if after Harry zapped the freshly Horcrux-bereft Dark Lord with the Elder Wand, Voldy managed to file multiple lawsuits claiming the Elder Wand was stolen and rightfully his, making his death technically impossible and leaving his existence in magical limbo, even though Draco Malfoy’s ineptitude, Neville’s prophecy, and a half-ton of heroics made it very possible.
The wizarding world then pauses indefinitely to allow the suits to play out; the now incorporeal Voldy summons all of his remaining Death Eaters via their Marks, who insist they really won the war despite being powerless, and the word spreads. The Daily Prophet attempts to point out the truth, but with its reputation in tatters after being taken over by the Death Eater-run Ministry of Magic during the war, few minds are changed. Fake news. Harry is flummoxed; rather than return to the status quo, he retains the Elder Wand just in case, maintaining a permanent epistemic cold war where Hogwarts both won the Second Wizarding War and lost it, depending on who’s talking.
In a weird way, a version of this scenario essentially what starts the Potterverse – Voldy being killed by his own spell, but refusing to die and plotting to return with the help of his inane followers.
This is all of course nonsense, even by the standards of a work of fantasy. Trump lost the election and the election wasn’t rigged in every battleground state in a massive conspiracy that necessarily would need the active, enthusiastic, and sworn-silent cooperation of hundreds of Republican officials, and any solid evidence otherwise would make any investigative reporter’s career.
And yet it is quite popular to believe otherwise because there is an emotional truth that supports that belief, and that emotional truth rests secure and invincible within a narrative shared between Trump and his supporters.
It is not as simple as a discreet Q pin or a MAGA hat or even the standard dog whistle phrasing and GOP talking points.
It’s a fantasy theme.
Fantasy themes are an old idea in rhetorical theory, related closely to narrative and social movement criticism.
The concept works thusly.
All humans don’t like bad news. Rather than deal with it directly and honestly, we tend to rationalize it. And when we rationalize bad news, we create a new mental narrative, a fantasy theme, that allows the rationalization to keep going.
The longer the rationalization keeps going, the stronger it gets and the more bad (and good) news it sweeps into its growing storyline. Confirmation bias is a closely related concept, as any incoming data is explained as part of the fantasy theme in a way that does not threaten the theme itself.
I am familiar with how this works not because I have some deep insight into Trump supporters. I am familiar with how this works because I have a deeply anxious personality that I am not always successful at working around; I thus alternate between deep dives into fantasy-theme thinking and cold rationality. I’m not alone in this.
Anxiety is an extremely fertile ground for fantasy theme development. In fact, it’s the only place, I believe, the worst fantasy themes can really take off.
Everyone uses fantasy themes, of course. Many are helpful and useful. My son thinks, for example, that I can fix anything and that I’m the greatest dad in the world. Both beliefs are completely and utterly false but this illusion protects him and lets him learn the value of trust and attachment, but I have to keep up my end to make that happen. He will discard these beliefs, of course, when he’s a teenager, and form another about how mindbogglingly stupid I am, only to discard that one around 25 or so. And so it goes.
Trump is anxious too. His supporters are as well. Many fear they are going to lose something if he does not get another term. Rather than confront this fear directly and form a coherent plan about future elections that involves the rest of the country’s wants, though, the wild west nature of half the internet combined with the wear and tear on the reputation of media outlets that fed Trump oxygen for years has given Trump voters a spectacular outlet for their anxiety.
So weird claims abound, and some days, even Fox News looks reasonable.
These claims don’t need to make much sense to fit into the shared illusion. They need only raise questions, and more questions, poking and prodding like a kid asking “why?” over and over, until the only answer is “I told you so,” the last argument of parents and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
There is no external argument to be made to a fantasy theme. It is completely self-sustaining and spreads easily, much like Covid. However, I do know of one thing that can shatter the hold of a fantasy theme.
Pretty much every postmodern novel since 1950 concerns itself with this question. The characters are enmeshed in a comfortable fantasy theme of some sort that avoids some structural unpleasantness in their lives and society. They grow uneasy and question the nature of reality and modernism. This conflict is brought to a head through some kind of violent act that kicks the protagonist into a new perspective that usually involves a spiritual reconnect to a supposed higher plane, though whatever form this new viewpoint takes, it’s really just another fantasy theme.
Perhaps a personal reckoning with reality isn’t enough anymore.
The center cannot hold, sure, but de-centering doesn’t seem to be holding very well lately, either, if people dying of Covid are refusing to believe they have Covid, a vaccine for a pandemic is seen as the problem, and gutting democracy is preferable to a one-term Democratic president, a critical alliance with Europe, better health care, and treating people that are not white as human beings with rights and dreams and value.
1860 comes to mind, when despite every slave state that eventually seceded having left Lincoln off the federal ballot, their inhabitants felt justified in declaring the union a tyranny.
But I’m being alarmist. There is nothing new under the sun, including saying there is nothing new under the sun.
At the height of classical Greece, a jury of 500 men in the world’s most famous democracy sentenced the most famous philosopher in the Western world to death for the crime of being really annoying. Richard Weaver, one of the few deans of Southern agrarian conservatism (and a noted rhetorician) once wrote a essay where he argued Socrates’s death sentence was just and deserved, as his open questioning of all of the Athenian sacred cows was a direct threat to the integrity of their culture. To allow him to wander the agora and speak to their inability to defend their arbitrary values could not be allowed to continue.
Weaver thus showcased the ultimate core value of conservatism – the preservation of a preferred culture in suspended political amber, the ironic elektron. The particulars are surprisingly unimportant compared to the steadiness of the refusal to move. Any inconsistencies or injustices or inhumanities are excusable as long as that central principle of culture in suspended animation is preserved.
Physics tells us that even the coldest atom is still vibrating with potential, but Weaver’s philosophy seems to take even that slow-motion quiver as a potential problem to be kept in check.
Refusal to acknowledge the election is over is, then, a massive and powerful fantasy theme of conservationism – a spectacular kind of shared hallucination that no change has happened. The silent majority triumphed. Four more years. Nothing to see here. All indications otherwise are fake news.
I am afraid, though, is that when that hallucination ends, one way or another, memories may fade and forgiveness may be doled out on an individual basis, but the internet has largely lost the ability to forget. This fantasy theme was recorded.
Every op-ed and Facebook post and tweet and text and letter and email insisting the election was rigged and Covid is just the flu and Trump is almost ready to finally destroy the deep state and launch an thousand-year reign of white civilization is now a permanent part of individual histories.
January 20 rolls around soon, and when it does, the Dark Marks will remain. They will not fade to scars. Slipping on a henley will not conceal them when anyone with a smartphone and half a brain can do a quick search.
Of course, in America, no conspiracy theorists rot in Azkaban. They will continue to roam the expanded agora, unlike Socrates, as long as they are peaceful. America remains more mature than Athens ever was, allowing even the dimmest philosophers and prophets to hold forth. The marketplace of ideas eventually devalues intellectual stock that bears no profit.
The Malfoys that tap out beforehand – and there is still plenty of time remaining – will rejoin and work with the centrist and center-left folks, as they always have, to build and grow the world. Perhaps they will cast themselves as victims of temporary insanity. It will be awkward. Second acts always are. But there is plenty of room for Slytherins in the world. Some of them have even been known to teach at Hogwarts.