Rowling Makes Political Declaration: “Left-Leaning Liberal, Anti-Authoritarian, Anti-Ideology, and Fervent Idealist”

J. K. Rowling on 10 November 2024, the eve of Armistice Day, elected to go to war with those who insist that she is “far right.”

In a four-paragraph tweet she re-stated her political commitments and core beliefs in something of a manifesto. In brief, she identifies as a “left-leaning liberal,” one who is “fiercely anti-authoritarian,” and a woman who simultaneously “mistrust[s] ideologies” and those captured by their loyalties to same while remaining “an idealist” believing “in human beings” and our natural goodness.

The three most interesting pieces of this twixter declaration to me are (1) the aside vis a vis “anti-authoritarianism” that “if you couldn’t deduce that from my work than you haven’t understood a word of it,” i.e., “my works are transparencies of my core beliefs” (cf. Lake and Shed), (2) her admission that the political left with whom she continues to identify no longer exists but has been replaced by an “identity based strain of politics I consider elitist,” and (3) her insistence that there is “currently an assault on woman’s rights,” one “unparalleled in my lifetime” “coming from both left and right.” This last despite the election of a US President by a profound majority for these times in the popular vote and Electoral College, a candidate who since February 2023 at least has publicly espoused all of Rowling’s TERF war objectives as his platform, not to mention that he is not anti-abortion post Roe but wants UK/EU type limits on infanticide.

That third point suggests she is something of an ideologue herself politically, despite her affirmation that she mistrusts those “who deny a bit of inconvenient truth to keep their world view intact.” And, as for being radically “anti-authoritarian,” Rowling never encountered a Covid interdict and repressive measure that she didn’t applaud and publicly support 2020 to 2024. Can you say “Missing in Action”? There’s quite a bit of willful blindness in these statements, in other words, and my chief take-away is the literary rather than political point that this confusion and mélange of contradictory positions can be “deduced” from a close reading of her work.

The twixter thread beneath the post had some interesting if very cordial push-back on her statement, to which she responded generously and with characteristic good humor:

Rowling responded by reiterating that she is a “left leaning liberal” though the “left” she embraces is a ghost. Her incapacity to grasp that the “massively disrupted” “old left/right metrics” mean that being “anti-elitist,” “anti-authoritarian,” and defender of free speech and, yes, biology based women’s rights makes one a member of the populist (which is to say working class and middle class) right wing of the political spectrum. Her ideological fixation on remaining a “leftist” has left Rowling a Miss Haversham in a wedding dress lamenting a decrying the groom who left her long ago.

I love, to be honest, the spin that her incapacity to acknowledge the realities of “right” and “left” globally is testament to her principled independence from group-think and wanting to be a good team member. One of Rowling’s greatest gifts, of course, is creating a fictional world into which she (along with millions of readers) can escape; sadly, she seems to be living in just such a fantasy dimension politically, however heroic her resistance has been to the plague of Gender Theory authoritarians.

Rowling retains a vibrant sense of humor, however, and shared it with the fans on this tweet’s thread:

And then she drops a bomb… In response to a tweeted reply to her post in which it is asserted that Dolores Umbridge “encapsulates everything that the tribe western leftist are,” Rowling agrees.

This from a woman who tweeted in the 2016 Presidential campaign that Trump was “much worse than Voldemort.” Now the Umbridge-tag has been affixed to “the tribe western leftist,” and described not as a singular evil, but in being “the most common type of villain in the world,” having its power in being legion and in sharing the delusion of righteousness with all their fellow oligarchs and autocrats in the Ministry of Magic government bureaucracy and Daily Prophet legacy media.

Again, my take-away from this declaration, reflective as it is of Rowling’s politics-in-transition with respect to the hashtags of “left” and “right” today, is much less with her chest-thumping as the last-standing uncompromised “left-leaning liberal” in the UK than it is with her affirmation about the substance of her work. The statement that her “anti-authoritarian” principles are easily deduced” by a careful reader of her novels adds one more flying buttress to her public witness that her writing springs from her core-beliefs, experience, and unresolved psychological issues.

Speaking of which, I hope to add another installment in the Pregnancy Trap series of posts this week. Stay tuned!