The Witching Season

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/opinion/sunday/the-witching-season.html

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The witching hour is upon us.

I’m talking not about Halloween but about Election Day — which, if you believe a vocal subset of conspiracy theorists, is when we’ll all get hexed.

Hillary Clinton’s more extreme critics routinely refer to her as a witch — earlier this month, Joseph Farah at World Net Daily asked, “Can you even imagine enduring four years of this witch as president?” He was presumably speaking figuratively, but a quick scroll through the Twitter hashtag #WitchHillary reveals that some people believe Mrs. Clinton actually practices the dark arts.

Several videos posted to YouTube in the last year attempt to make this case. One, titled “Hillary Clinton – The Antichrist or the Illuminati Witch?” includes testimony by the Clinton conspiracy theorist Larry Nichols, who claims that Mrs. Clinton routinely left Arkansas to worship with a group of women at a “witches’ church” in Los Angeles.

Portraying powerful women as witches is a time-honored tactic. The writers Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have argued that the first accusations of witchcraft in Europe grew out of male doctors’ anxieties about competition from female healers. Even when such accusations aren’t literal, they are attempts to delegitimize women’s authority by painting women as devious, corrupt and scheming. The alt-right radio host Alex Jones, for instance, recently called Mrs. Clinton an “evil wicked witch” who wanted to steal the election and who was “picked by the globalists to curse this country.”

In her excellent essay on Hillary Clinton and Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president and a practicing Spiritualist, Jessa Crispin argues that we could use more witchcraft in our politics, not less. Witches, she writes, have “faith in the balance between humans and the natural world, in the power of sexuality, in human equality and dignity, and in community over hierarchical power or authority.”

These values have been powerfully absent from a campaign season dominated by a man who once boasted that his wealth and status allowed him to grab women’s genitals. To find the spirit of witchcraft as Ms. Crispin explains it, we may have to look to pop culture.

“Blair Witch,” released last month, is something of a disappointment in this regard. The villain of the film, a sequel to the 1999 classic “The Blair Witch Project,” is not so much a traditional witch as a mysterious entity with a wide array of seemingly unrelated powers, including the ability to stop the rotation of the earth and to induce foot infections.

“The Witch,” released in February, is more interesting. An exploration of age-old anxieties about female sexuality and power, it tells the story of a young woman accused of witchcraft so often that she decides to embrace it. It will also make you afraid of goats.

For a fuller examination of what a politics of witchcraft might look like, though, I recommend “The Craft.” This 1996 film, which follows four high school students who form a coven, isn’t necessarily a how-to guide for successful witching, since things don’t end well for all the characters, but it is a story of women coming together to develop and use their awesome powers to punish their enemies. If you’re looking for some relief from the misogyny exhibited by this year’s Republican nominee, you could do a lot worse.