Lion King Brain: Thanksgiving Aunts and Hometown That-Guys
Please let’s not base our 2020 Democratic candidate decisions on the happy ending from a children’s fantasy movie
This past Thanksgiving week gave me the opportunity to do two things: fool around with a family member’s Disney+ account and play audience to a myriad of half-hearted political takes from uncles-in-law and friends of friends. By week’s end I’d gained a more complete understanding of what causes the type of mindset that feels a positive connotation toward someone like Amy Klobuchar.
Let’s start with the Disney.
After sampling half a dozen different movies from my childhood, I settled in for the crown jewel of the Disney Renaissance and watched The Lion King for the first time in twenty years or so. The first hour holds up magnificently, what with the animation and the songs. You don’t need me to tell you this! But I regret to report that the movie’s final act — basically, everything that comes after the showstopping banger “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” — is an incomprehensible shitshow, a mishmash of conflicting themes and conflated solutions that eerily mirrors the confused politics of our present day.
To set the stage and refresh your memory:
Mufasa used to rule the Pride Lands and all the lions loved him because he was articulate and paternal. The hyenas felt abandoned if not outright harassed by Mufasa, so they helped Scar overthrow him. Now Scar rules the Pride Lands, and all the lions hate him because he’s just kind of a lazy and rude asshole whose sole motivation is to rule the Pride Lands. And now there is a famine in the Pride Lands and the hyenas and lions alike are not doing very well.
Importantly, the famine is not due to any new Scar-specific policies; his, uh, “socioeconomy,” in which the lionesses hunt for food and share it with everyone, is identical to Mufasa’s. Rather, it is the lions’ very lifestyle that’s failing them, running the Pride Lands bone dry. Simba’s mother goes as far as to criticize Scar by specifically suggesting that Mufasa “would have left the Pride Lands by now,” implying that she (and perhaps she alone) recognizes the folly of maintaining this broken status quo in the face of all its failures. But by and large, the lions aren’t looking to leave the failing Pride Lands; they’re just looking to oust Scar, because they hate him. For them, the wrong guy is in charge, and simply getting rid of him would solve everything.
Let’s put a bookmark in The Lion King here and dip a toe into the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary, and specifically on how it’s being approached by all of our favorite Thanksgiving aunts (loosely liberal, but with a general apathy toward the distinction between centrist and leftist policies and candidates — the “any Dem will do” crowd) and hometown that-guys (moderate or apolitical people who feel just plain rotten about Donald freaking Trump being the dang president and rationalize that the best way to beat him is to go as far right as possible).
By and large, these people aren’t rooting for any candidate who would abandon the failing neoliberal policies that have shifted the Democratic Party steadily rightward for the past thirty years; they’re just looking for a candidate who can oust Donald Trump, because they hate him. For them, the wrong guy is in charge, and simply getting rid of him would solve everything.
Back to The Lion King.
Simba, having fled the Pride Lands in shame after Scar gaslit him into believing he’d killed his own father, lives in a utopian jungle paradise under the Hakuna Matata mindset. It is an entirely different lifestyle than the one he experienced in the Pride Lands. He isn’t a king — hell, there is no king! — but he and his new friends want for nothing; food is abundant, life is easy, and they spend their ample free time exercising, stargazing, and philosophizing about their own dead ancestors. Then Nala shows up and ruins everything by telling Simba about all the shit going down in the Pride Lands.
You can see where I’m going with all of this. Without pigeonholing myself into too hyper-specific an allegory: Mufasa is Obama, Scar is Trump, the hyenas are MAGA chuds, the lions are Thanksgiving aunts and hometown that-guys, and the famine in the Pride Lands is late stage capitalism in 2019.
The Hakuna Matata mindset is, broadly, any and all of the not-even-novel ideas being proposed by any of the Democratic candidates whose platforms consist of something more than, “I’m the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump,” or, “I just want to be Obama again.” It’s any progressive policy that any other nation or state has successfully implemented that may actually help everyday American people in 2020 and beyond. It’s everything that Bernie Sanders wants and that Elizabeth Warren says she wants — universal healthcare, higher taxes on billionaires, tighter environmental regulations — but it’s also Tulsi Gabbard’s isolationism, Andrew Yang’s UBI, and even Marrianne Williamson’s vague concept of “outrageous love.” In short, the Hakuna Matata mindset is any alternative at all to doing exactly the same things we’ve been doing and expecting different results than we’ve been getting. As such, it’s tolerated but not adored by Thanksgiving aunts and it scares the shit out of hometown that-guys.
At this point in the movie, it is plainly apparent that there is exactly one reasonable and ethical course of action for Simba to take. Upon hearing that the lions and hyenas alike are suffering back in the Pride Lands under the dated and failing systemic policies of Mufasa and Scar, it is Simba’s moral imperative to return home and tell his people about this alternative he’s discovered, this so-called “Hakuna Matata.” Surely the lions and hyenas alike will abandon vile Scar and the busted Pride Lands for Simba’s utopian jungle paradise, and Simba will be hailed as both an innovative genius and also the savior of his people, going down in history as the truest and greatest “Lion King.”
Except, no! That’s not what happens at all! Instead, Simba abandons the Hakuna Matata mindset when his girlfriend accuses him of being a failson. (The famous phrase is never uttered again for the rest of the movie, nor is the jungle ever mentioned.) Instead, he confronts Scar back in the Pride Lands and Scar is ultimately betrayed by the same hyenas who killed Mufasa in order to put him in power. And then in the final scene we cut to Simba’s reign over the Pride Lands, where the famine is over and the hyenas are gone, and the moral of the story is that everything just kind of works out when the right guy is in charge again, even when nothing else changes at all.
This is a patently asinine fantasy! And that’s okay, because it is also the third act of a children’s movie. But it is also also the way so many well-intentioned Thanksgiving aunts and hometown that-guys seem to think the 2020 election ought to unfold. And that’s not okay, because it is a patently asinine fantasy from the third act of a children’s movie!
In particular, Simba’s rise resolving all the problems in the Pride Lands almost uncannily represents national frontrunner Joe Biden’s pitch in a nutshell — that the same “hyenas” who felt abandoned by Obama and the Democratic party in 2016 will not only turn on Trump in 2020 to align with Biden, but also “come to their senses,” or whatever, under an administration that explicitly sells itself as being Barack Obama’s third term in order to win over Thanksgiving aunts. Pete Buttigieg, meanwhile, has surged in the polls of late not by offering a single policy distinguishable in any way from those enacted under Obama and Trump, but largely by scoffing at the “Hakuna Matata” mindsets on his left flank in order to win over hometown that-guys.
Of course, real life is not a children’s movie, the braying hyenas in MAGA hats aren’t going anywhere, and it is absurd to suggest that the solution to any of our current problems is to do nothing whatsoever about them at all! It may be comfortable and palattable for Thanksgiving aunts and hometown that-guys to believe, without much consideration, that Donald Trump and his brash attitudes are a once-in-a-lifetime aberration in an otherwise extremely stable political landscape, rather than a harbinger of things to come from now on in every single election if nothing substantial changes, but such a belief is — and I can’t stress this enough — akin to believing that real life works like a Disney movie.
It is myopic as hell that defeating Donald Trump by any means necessary is the sole priority for so many voters in 2020! If the Dems retake the White House with a do-nothing-but-retake-the-White House attitude, then by definition they’ve accomplished everything they’ve set out to do before Inauguration Day has ended. I mean, what’s the point? What exactly does the rest of that type of presidency entail? Four years is a long time to spend doing absolutely nothing, and imagine what kind of candidate the MAGA hyenas will roll out in 2024 after stewing in anger for four more years! And then in 2028. And then in 2032. And so on and so forth, as we’re all doomed to repeat this same sad cycle ad nauseam, circling the drain forever until everything finally just collapses.
I will not claim — today, at least — that I know which specific iteration of “Hakuna Matata” ideas from the Democratic candidates and primaries will solve all of our collective problems. But I will absolutely claim that it is better for us to at least attempt addressing any of those problems than it is to pretend that any of the candidates campaigning so hard on doing nothing would, upon becoming president, fix anything. Or, in terms the Thanksgiving aunts and hometown that-guys can appreciate now that they all have Disney+, it is time to embrace Hakuna Matata and leave the Pride Lands for greener pastures.
