Okay, personally I haven't read any Harry Potter. At some point I peeped into one of the books to flip through it before making a commitment to what was already a series, and it looked dull and derivative, so I passed. But I'm sure many of you read some HP, so I thought this article might be of interest. So if you don't like it, don't yell at me. (I'm posting a longer excerpt than I normally would because I know accessing the NYT has become more difficult.)
The Harry Potter Generation Needs to Grow Up
By Louise Perry
It’s been almost 20 years since the final Harry Potter book was released. The wizarding world is still generating interest — book sales remain strong, and the 2023 video game Hogwarts Legacy topped 40 million sales. HBO is working on a TV adaptation of the books, set to be released next year.
But the relevance of the franchise is waning. “We’ve seen our audience age up,” conceded a Warner Bros. executive of the recent spinoff films...
You don’t see this with fiction like “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Sales of those books may rise and fall in response to new film or TV adaptations, but those franchises aren’t bound to a particular generation in the way that Harry Potter is bound to the millennials. Perhaps that is partly a consequence of the fact that, as children, millennials experienced the release of both the Harry Potter books and the Warner Bros. films as a series of multimedia events that were skillfully hyped.
But there are also politics at play. Ms. Rowling foregrounds ideology in her books, and that means that her novels feel dated in a way that others do not. Conceived over 30 years ago, the Harry Potter books are very much a product of 1990s liberalism: a moment when World War II still occupied a central space in the cultural imagination, and when it was still possible to believe that the best bits of the old political order could be retained alongside a gentle incorporation of the new.
That’s why millennials like Harry Potter a whole lot more than younger generations do. The story captures a worldview that is no longer attractive to young people jaded by the experiences of economic decline, political polarization and spiraling identity politics. They have fallen out of love with Harry Potter because they have fallen out of love with the worldview the series represents. Which is to say that young people have fallen out of love with liberalism....
Harry Potter both reflected and reinforced the politics of readers who came of age during the postwar liberal era. One 2014 study, cited by Hillary Clinton during a speech on the importance of libraries, suggested that reading Harry Potter increased sympathy toward immigrants, gay people and refugees. In another piece of research, published in 2013, Anthony Gierzynski, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, with the artist Kathryn Eddy, tested the hypothesis that millennials who read Harry Potter ended up mirroring the political ideals of the books more than those who didn’t:
We found that Harry Potter fans tend to be more accepting of those who are different, to be more politically tolerant, to be more supportive of equality, to be less authoritarian, to be more opposed to the use of violence and torture, to be less cynical, and to evince a higher level of political efficacy...
Liberalism is not the human default. It is a style of doing politics that can be sustained only in a society that is peaceful, affluent and high-trust all at once — a rare combination in our species’ history. Under such conditions, we might well see a widespread tolerance of free speech, a rejection of political violence and a popular faith in democratic processes. But when a society becomes more fractured and more threatened, those ideals may be quickly abandoned, and the aging elites who oversaw the process of decline will not be looked on kindly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/opinion/harry-potter-millenials-liberalism.html