The Politics of Halloween

Though I cannot recall quite how, I recently stumbled across a fascinating POLITICO article by former Harvard lecturer John F. Muller titled “Halloween Is More Political Than You Think”. It discusses trick-or-treating in America, focusing specifically on Milwaukee, and the surprising observations Halloween brings to the table in discussions on both racial and class divisions. Muller explores how poor, inner-city ethnic minorities often travel to affluent white suburbs during the day, aspiring not only for greater sugar hauls but safety. Native suburb-dwellers instead trick-or-treat at night, comfortable in the darkness of their middle American commuter belt, creating stark night and day differences in the ethnic composition of door-knockers. 

Further, Muller makes clear that Halloween can divide as much as it can unite. The holiday forces every community to debate the question of who is a member; who can and can’t be trusted with handing out sweets to the area’s innocent youths. Some gated residencies control entrances tightly, often ticketing entrance at a fee. Other areas feel a moral obligation to provide treats to kids as some kind of wholesome, if disconcerting, effort to address poverty and malnutrition. Sadly, structural inequality is yet to be defeated through Jack O’Lanterns and plastic cobwebs. As Muller did, this article explores the understated political dimensions of Halloween, synthesising the ideas and questions the season raises about civic trust, geopolitics, and capitalism. 

Halloween across the Atlantic is far less prevalent a celebration. Britons tend to care more for Bonfire Night – many going so far as to (wrongly) label Halloween a “tacky nightmare”. Regardless of the comparatively reduced popularity in the UK, the holiday can still make contributions to our political discourse. Just as the Americans are, we are confronted with the question of whom we trust, with the answer likely rooted in similar ethnic and economic tensions. 

That question serves as a useful focal point. Widespread concerns over immigration, racial division, and cultural unity shape how and where Halloween is popular, and who is engaging in the activities of the season. I’m not saying Reform voters aren’t carving pumpkins this year, but given the collective nature of the holiday (one can Halloween alone, but its true essence comes in engaging with fellow merrymakers), a correlation between ‘faith in the local community’ and ‘willingness to send the kids door-knocking for sweets’ isn’t far-fetched. The death of allowing kids to play outside unaccompanied is a similar metric. 

Halloween and civic trust are therefore linked, as civic trust and politics have always been. Classical political philosophy holds (through social contract theory) that security is one of the state's key functions. Door-knocking is thus a test of a state’s internal security; youths are directly defying all typical rules of safety – they’re proactively talking to strangers and wandering off into the dark. Citizens no longer believing in communal trust represent a defeat in the concept on which civic society is built, and it follows that you don’t trust the state, or the officials who run it, either. Distrust in the state and its establishment is the reason why the UK is facing such civil upheaval, and ever-growing concerns about migration and economic inequalities are at its core. Britain’s social fabric is threatened by increasing malaise, or in some instances, a loathing of the nation itself. Though Halloween isn’t the answer to this issue, it is an indicative example of the UK’s current social tensions. 

Stepping back from the loaded debates dominating the broadsheets and party conferences, Halloween is marked by an innate politicisation that transcends the US and the UK. The most common costumes and decorations, often strung up in windows, gardens, or upon public-facing exterior walls leading up to the 31st of October, are the likes of zombies, vampires, werewolves, and ghosts. The latter, the haunting ghoul, is intrinsic to Halloween, with the origins of the modern celebration harkening back to the Celtic festival of Samhain, where spirits and ghosts that blurred between the lands of the living and the dead were warded off with carved turnips. Long (politically) dead entities certainly haunt various political organisations today like spectres, and their metaphorical use is widespread. 

A swift internet search brings several ghost stories that have permeated the narrative, with Thatcher still haunting the Conservative Party and Blair the Labour Party. Transcending the use of ghastly ghouls in the headlines, the concept of political hauntings persists globally. American exceptionalism and a deep desire to retain hegemonic bliss certainly haunt the US, as does the Cold War. Across Europe, the Cold War remains equally haunting; the looming threat of a Soviet invasion during the latter half of the 20th century doubtless left its mark on today’s leaders. The shadowy threat of Russia and China seems to grow larger year on year, with the two nations both headed by authoritative stalwarts who will influence policy long after they’ve passed on from this plane and into the next. 

Of course, you could swap out the usage of a ghost metaphor for a range of others, reducing this point to little more than an interesting linguistic footnote. However, the idea of hauntings applies with particular potency in geopolitics, in that history often shapes, rather than merely precedes, the future. The behaviour of states internationally is not defined by a single moment, but by a culmination of all the moments that have come before it. Take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an example: the Kremlin is desperately clinging to the idea of the USSR as NATO continues to encircle and restrict Moscow’s hand. Russia is unable to accept its long-term decline in international standing and cannot shake the haunting spirit of its glory days. Guided almost by the spectral hand of its former self, Russia is invading Ukraine to prove not only to the West that it still can, but to itself. Similar tapestries of history haunt all international relationships, not solely as a metaphorical force, but as a materially influential one.  

When it comes to the living dead, there is a particular semantic theme that permeates leftist ideology. Built into the fabric of leftist discourse is the work of Marx, which is littered with mentions of various nightspawn; a certain vampiric quality is consistently applied to capitalism and capitalist structures. Marx believed the owners of the means of production extract the value from workers, leaving them as wealthless husks. Swap wealth for blood, and workers are left like one of Dracula’s victims. The image of the proletariat as undead creatures at the whim of malicious forces operates surprisingly well as an educational tool, depicting Marx’s views with a surprising degree of accuracy. Perhaps Marx’s ideas can themselves be seen as zombified. While they retain a certain enduring relevance, it is clear they were inaccurate in forecasting the downfall of capitalist society. Despite the death of one of its central tenets, the ideals still wander the political landscape, a husk lingering beyond their time.  

Halloween offers a unique utility which I doubt many see as an element of the holiday. Whether as a metric by which to gauge societal class divides or as a widely used linguistic tool, there is an understated value offered to a phenomenon many consider far scarier than ghosts, spiders, and serial killers: politics. Halloween’s metaphoric monsters and seasonal jaunts can tell us a lot about the world around us, both in the theoretical and practical realms, serving as an educational tool or as a satirical one. 

Returning to the article with which this piece began, Muller asks who we trust, and why. Halloween may come around only once a year, but the fundamental questions it poses linger long after the decorations are taken down and pumpkins binned. Harkening to the human state of nature, we are naturally fearful creatures, and Halloween wonderfully twists that into something playful. It’s all fun and games when it’s the monster under our bed, but what happens when those fears manifest in our civic society? Where do we turn? It’s challenging to give any answer other than politics.

Image: Flickr/Trump White House (Tia Dufour)

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