The anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston described folklore as “the boiled-down juice of human living.” It is present everywhere and always and is continually being produced and reproduced, even in the most modern of societies. She regarded folklore as an important object of study because it can tell us so much about the people who make and consume it. As I argued in a guest essay for Times Opinion this week, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise has found such extraordinary success because the story represents the “boiled-down juice” of our era — or more accurately, perhaps, the era just past. Part of Rowling’s genius is that she is a magpie, taking a little treasure here and there from the cultural record and putting it all together to make something simultaneously new and familiar. So the Harry Potter series contains a lot of very old folklore: giants, goblins, dragons, phoenixes, wizards and the rest. But on top of this, Rowling layered a modern political message that was expressive of the time and place in which the stories were written. (It’s been nearly two decades since the last book in the series was published.) Rowling continually encourages her young readers to embrace liberal values like tolerance, free expression, democracy and nonviolence. In the world of Harry Potter, evil can always be defeated, even (or especially) by the humblest and most unexpected heroes. These are fundamentally optimistic books. We should understand Harry Potter as a kind of liberal folklore. The stories reflect back at us the deepest yearnings of the liberal imagination. But the franchise is no longer as popular with young people today, which is partly a consequence of Zoomers on both the left and right taking a very different approach to politics. Liberal folklore is no longer attractive to a generation disillusioned with liberalism.
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