'Deleted Scene' from Anti-Potter 2

As I write this, the news - and Twitter - is full of the fact that Boris Johnson has called Corbyn a “mugwump”.  He seems to have intended it as… well, actually, it’s hard to say what he intended.  But the word is interesting.  It meant ‘turncoat’ for a long time after being coined in the US in the C19th to describe party defectors… meaning the word is, by that definition, far more applicable to the notoriously treacherous Johnson himself.  Since then it has come to mean ‘someone who stands aloof from politics’, which hardly seems like an idea even Corbyn’s worst enemies would ascribe to him.  The irony is that in recent years the term has come to take on connotations of wisdom, which is also probably not what Johnson was going for.  Johnson claimed to think the word was from a Roald Dahl novel, which doesn’t help us clear things up at all, though it does once again remind us how much of our political discourse is influenced by fiction - and kids’ fiction at that!  Perhaps he just thought it sounded good, coming after “muddle-headed, old…”.  I suspect, however, that he instinctively lighted on this word because of its inherent racism.  It is a distorted appropriation of an Algonquin word for ‘war chief’, garbled and used as an insult by white people.  I doubt Johnson knew this (he is a profoundly ignorant and incurious man), but he has an inbuilt radar which drives him intuitively, eager and open-armed, towards anything racist.  Of course, I imagine most of my readers here will think soonest of the aliens in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, but I seriously doubt Boris Johnson has read much Burroughs.  But by far the most prominent usage of the word in recent years has been in the Harry Potter books and films.  ‘Supreme Mugwump’ is one of Dumbledore’s titles.  Young people today who know the word at all are probably most likely to have encountered it first in the pages of Potter.  And it’s interesting again because of the etymology I just mentioned.  As I say, historically, the word means ‘turncoat’ (deriving from its application to people who changed party allegiance) or ‘one who aloof from politics’.  Dumbledore is undoubtedly meant to be the apotheosis of sagacity and goodness in the books.  And, as usual, Rowling connotes sagacity and goodness through signifiers of political detachment… in both senses: the sense of being aloof and the sense of being decoupled from unwavering loyalty.  Again, goodness and wisdom stem from passive acceptance.  (Yes, I know Dumbledore gets into hassles with the Ministry.  Stop nitpicking.  The point is that he gets into these hassles with them precisely because they refuse to acknowledge the existence of a threat to their own continued status quo.  Yet another thread to pick up another time.)

It’s worth remembering the context in which ‘mugwump’ came to mean ‘turncoat’.  It was coined by a newspaper editor to denote those Republicans - like Mark Twain, for instance - who decided to vote for the Democrat Grover Cleveland in the extremely close Presidential election of 1884, rather than for the Republican candidate, the corrupt but teflon-coated James Blaine.  It was used to describe people who voted from principle rather than party-affiliation.  And who, at least in the case of Cleveland vs. Blaine, appear to have swung the vote decisively away from their own party and towards their opponents.

Rowling seems to have intended to imply that Dumbledore - the person to whom she attaches the appellation - is wise and impartial, Johnson was clearly implying that Corbyn is a foolish-yet-authoritarian tribal chief (surely tautologous in his conception of the world).  Clearly, neither of them were particularly clear on what the word actually means...though, to be fair, it’s a deeply ambiguous word with a chequered past.  The irony is that Johnson and Rowling - both of whom heartily disapprove of Jeremy Corbyn, and neither of whom are people particularly troubled by self-awareness - are using a word which disparagingly connotes a person of principle as sanctimonious, and also as being to blame for damaging their own party.  Very applicable to Corbyn, at least as far as some are concerned - Rowling included.