Pseudonym said:
On this specifically. Have you seen dragon ball? If so, do you remember that time when Goku defeated the red ribbon army. All of them. In pretty much one fell swoop. Well, I took it that something like that was going on. Harry Potter's world is one where some people are immeasurably stronger than others, even before any politics and help. At one point Dumbledore just straight up knocks out all of a team of cops sent to arrest him, within a second, without seriously harming them. He doesn't need to because they are barely a threat to him. Voldemort has succeeded in making himself close to immortal. He can kill pretty much anyone he wants to if he really puts his mind to it, he can teleport around in several ways, can read Harries mind across the world and may or may not have cursed his own name. This kind of power difference takes away an important element of our politics, that we are all powerless when alone against a group. This simply doesn't hold for Voldemort and he presumably leveraged that to instill fear into others and get more power. In that way Harry Potter just isn't altogether analogous to our world and our politics.
Yes, I have seen OG Dragonball. Not in a long time, to be honest, but I have seen it and I remember some of it quite fondly, unlike Dragonball Z, which I think is really awful. Now, Dragon Ball established rather early that Goku was from an alien race that's physically superior to humans and that, when pitted against normal human enemies, Goku would probably wipe the floor with them, even before he trained with Muten Roshi. That was, of course, before Dragonball Z came along and turned a lighthearted story about a goofy kid travelling the world to recover magical wishgranting balls into endless, repetetive wankery about which alien superhero can wipe out more planets with their farts. But I digress. Yes, it is established that Voldemort and Dumbledore are exceptionally powerful wizards but the books mostly treat magic capabilities as a result of study and practice, rather than something some people are just inherently more powerful at than others. In fact a lot about the greater themes hinge on acknowledging that the wizards who think they're better at magic, just because the can trace their wizard ancestry back to ancient times, are full of shit. Dumbledore and Voldermort are exceptionally powerful wizards because they're very old and dedicated most of their lifes to studying magic. Young Tom Riddle, before he managed to cheat death by using horcruxes, could have probably been stopped.
Pseudonym said:
The rest of the answer answer would be that part of his following was racists (the Malfoys), some other parts sadistic nutjobs (Bellatrix) attracted to Voldemorts way of doing things, and the rest people who thought he would win and didn't want to get on his bad side (that rat guy whose hand got cut off, the Malfoys again). It is not that hard to see where those people came from. There was a lot of racism in the Harry Potter world. The school they go to has four alignments: brave (hero's), hardworking (saps), smart (nerds) and pureblood (racists). There was also a lot of cruelty going around. Remember how the government uses inhumane happiness sucking demons as their prison guards? Remember how the school janitor was in favor of torturing the students? And like you said, the trust in the official powers that be was understandably fairly low. Everyone has infiltrated everyone else. So all of that and there are always some crazy people around.
And I'm not really sure Voldemort doesn't really matter all that much. He's just really evil and needs to be stopped. Where he came from and the politics of how he got followers is less interesting than the events happening in the story right now.
The fact that wizard society is, in a lot of ways, lagging behind muggle society, in some regards almost seems to be stuck in the middle ages, was actually always one of my favourite parts of the books. I think they gave away some potential by never really adressing it. Actually, one of the things that really rub me the wrong way about them is that they treated Hermiones campaign to liberate house elves as a joke much of the time. It's... very hard to seperate the books entirely from Rowlings public persona, a persona that never endeared itself much to me, but it's one of these matters where it seems to me that Rowling tried to score some good girl points by including a progressive cause but never fully understood how that cause relates to real life.
See, you say Voldemorts background and his ideology isn't as interesting as the immediate events of the plot but personally I think it is. And maybe that's just my viewpoint as an adult but I'm pretty sure by the time the last few books came out most of its readers were adults and people in the latter half of their teens. Voldemort in general could have used some character development.
