America and the Magic Order of US (part I)
This article was also published in The Fulcrum and Waging Nonviolent
Part I - The Ministry Denies It
Like many true elder millennials, I find comfort in escaping into fantasy worlds – Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars. But lately, these stories haven’t just been a break from the chaos of real life. They’ve become a lens for understanding it. They remind me what courage looks like when the odds are stacked, and what it means to stand up, not just to threats to justice, but to silence, complicity, and fear.
Lately, I’ve been thinking less about the final battles, the catharsis, the clarity, the triumphant arrival of friends. We’re not there yet. Not even close. What I keep returning to is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, despite the deep discomfort of doing so — since it means revisiting a story that shaped my early moral imagination while reckoning with the dehumanizing and othering beliefs and behavior of its author. For all its flaws and the real harm she has caused, it remains a story that gave many of us early language for power, resistance and moral choice. This is that chapter — the one where everything tightens. The danger is real. The protagonists are scattered. The institutions are eroding and the air gets heavy with denial and dread.
Voldemort has returned, but the Ministry of Magic refuses to admit it. Rather than confront the threat, those in power turn on the people who do. Truth-tellers are ridiculed, surveilled, and silenced. Education, once meant to foster critical thinking, is recast as indoctrination. Dissent becomes disruption. Truth becomes dangerous.
At the center of it all is Dolores Umbridge, smiling through pink cardigans and kitten plates as she issues decree after decree. Her power doesn’t come from brute force, but from something more insidious: the weaponization of bureaucracy. She governs through policy, paperwork, and punishment, tightening control with every rule and ritual designed to reward obedience and punish defiance.
It’s also not just the rules; it’s the gaslighting. A kind so relentless that it makes you question your memory of what’s right, of what’s real. For instance, when Harry insists Voldemort has returned, Umbridge punishes him for “lying,” forcing him to write the phrase “I must not tell lies,” a denial of truth etched into his own skin.
Today’s decrees aren’t written in magical ink, but they echo those same tactics. They come dressed as executive orders, targeted investigations, and retaliatory firings masked as efficiency, which looks like governance but functions as something else entirely. As political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt warn, “Most 21st-century autocrats are elected… They convert public institutions into political weapons.” In this model, repression hides behind bureaucracy. It’s disguised as a process, making it harder to name, and easier to doubt your instincts.
The goal also isn’t just control. It’s to make resistance feel reckless. “When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government,” they write, “because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.”
That’s the danger right now: when fear isolates, and silence starts to feel like strategy.
And what makes it more disorienting is that we can’t even agree on what’s happening. Some see democratic collapse. Others see righteous restoration. Many disengage entirely, unmoved, overwhelmed, or unwilling to name it.
This isn’t just polarization, it’s a fracture in shared reality. And beneath that fracture, something even more destabilizing: a collapse of trust.
Trust is more than a sentiment. It’s the scaffolding of civic life, the thing that makes dissent possible, and gives us confidence that others will stand beside us, even if they don’t fully agree.
But according to a new report by the Pew Research Center, 64% of Americans say most people can’t be trusted, a number that hasn’t budged since 2016. And when trust erodes, democracy doesn’t collapse all at once; it decays quietly, from within.
Even in that decay, though, something begins to grow, not because it’s safe, but because it’s necessary.
In the Order of the Phoenix, the institutions are compromised. The leadership is absent. The heroes are scattered. And still, something forms. Dumbledore’s Army doesn’t begin with a sweeping call to arms. It begins in the margins, with a few people deciding they won’t wait for permission to defend what matters. It wasn’t a dramatic uprising. It was a quiet refusal to comply in advance.
This is where we choose what kind of characters we want to be, not waiting for a rescue (because no one is coming), but recognizing the story depends on us.
Fantasy stories – and history – remind us: turning points rarely feel like turning points. They don’t come with clarity or consensus. They come with hesitation. They come when people stop waiting for the right moment and start acting anyway.
