The Muggle Problem -

The Muggle Problem -
In the Potter novels the selective school is conterminous with wizarding society as a whole (allowing for some elves and goblins to do maintenance and keep the books), and thus the threats to
that world’s liberal integrity all come from within the academy’s walls, from Slytherin House and its arrogant aristocrats, who must be constantly confronted in the halls and classrooms of the beloved school itself.
The proper treatment of Muggles, meanwhile, is the great controversy within the wizarding world, where the good guys want them protected, left alone
and sometimes studied, while the bad guys want to see them subjugated or enslaved (and all the Muggle-born “mudbloods” purged from the wizarding ranks).
For the six readers who have never read the Potter books
but who have stuck with the column thus far nonetheless: Muggles are non-magical folks, the billions of regular everyday human beings who live and work in blissful ignorance that the wizarding world exists.
Prendergast also offered a harsh assessment of the trend: “If you have ever wondered why young people are often so childish in their politics, why they want to divide the world between tolerant progressives
and wicked reactionaries, it helps to understand” that they think they’re living in a Potter novel.
So even from the perspective of the enlightened, progressive wizarding faction, then, Muggles are basically just a vast surplus population
that occasionally produces the new blood that wizarding needs to avoid becoming just a society of snobbish old-money inbred Draco Malfoys.