Book-Banning: Another Bad Look For Republican Candidates, Up And Down The Ballot

Ron DeSantis is hardly the first skeptic of democracy to insist on the banning of books. In fact, neither Plato nor Socrates believed that the masses were capable of making informed decisions and both advocated for the banning of certain books, plays and poems. In his dialogues, Plato often presents his ideas through the character of Socrates, who is depicted as a gadfly who challenges the assumptions and beliefs of his fellow citizens. Socrates' questioning and critical approach to knowledge and morality made him a controversial figure in his own time, and he was eventually put on trial and sentenced to death by the Athenian government.

Basically, Plato believed that literature could have a powerful influence on society and individuals. He argued that certain types of rhetorical could be harmful to society by promoting immoral behavior or corrupting the morals of young people. In The Republic, he called for censorship of literature that he deemed harmful. Specifically, he argued that literature that depicted gods and heroes as immoral or unjust should be banned, as well as literature that depicted graphic violence or sex. He also objected to literature that was overly emotional or sensational, arguing that such works could lead people to make irrational decisions or be swayed by their emotions. Overall, Plato believed that literature should be used to promote virtue and morality, and that the state had a responsibility to ensure that only "good" literature was allowed to circulate in society.

Plato went so far as to propose a system of censorship and control over literature and the arts. In Book II of The Republic, he has Socrates propose that certain types of stories and poetry should be banned from the ideal society that he is describing, because they are harmful to the moral character of citizens. Later in Book III, he has Socrates propose that the government should exercise control over the arts, specifically in the areas of music and poetry. He argues that certain types of music and poetry can have a negative effect on the moral character of citizens, and that the government should therefore only allow art that promotes virtuous behavior and values.

I’m not trying to lump DeSantis in with Plato and Socrates. He might be better lumped in with soulmates like Hann’s Johst and his Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Chamber of Literature), Nazi Minister of Education Bernhard Rust and, of course, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. And I’m sure you’ve heard of the notorious Index Librorum Prohibitorum— Index of Prohibited Books— a list of books first issued in 1559 by Pope Paul IV, that were banned by the Roman Catholic Church. It was discontinued, in 1966, causing plenty of consternation in conservative circles. Early on in its illustrious history, the Index banned all works by Martin Luther and John Calvin, Voltaire’s and Thomas Hobbes’ work and books by Copernicus, Machiavelli, Gallileo… even Cervantes’ Don Quixote because the Church found it irreverent and disrespectful to authority.

DeSantis— and most of today’s conservatives— would have felt right at home with the Medieval— pre-Renaissance— Church— and with authoritarian book-banners throughout history, from Stalin and Hitler and the Taliban to Republican role model Joe McCarthy. Among the books banned during the McCarthy era are classics— some of which DeSantis is trying to have banned today:

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck for promoting anti-capitalist notions

• Animal Farm by George Orwell for promoting anti-American ideas and anthropomorphism, which frightened them

• Native Son by Richard Wright for shining a spotlight of racism and fro advocating for social change

• The Crucible by Arthur Miller for being a thinly-veiled critique of the anti-Communist hysteria of the day

• Howl by Allen Ginsberg for depicting homosexuality and drug use

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley because it was perceived as being critical of capitalist society, also for frank depictions of sex and drugs

• The Catcher in The Rye by J.D. Salinger for vulgarity, immorality, rebelliousness and anti-authoritarisnism

• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison was too anti-racist

• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee was also viewed as too anti-racist

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X horrified the establishment for promoting Black nationalism and advocating social change and criticizing racism.

Funny… almost all of these books were required reading when I was in elementary and high school. Yesterday, The Atlantic published an essay by Ron Brownstein, The Book-Bans Debate Has Finally Reached A Turning Point, pointing out that progressive-minded people are standing up to conservative, censorious bullies. He noted that Katie Paris, the founder of the group, Red Wine and Blue told him that “We are not going to let the mantle of parents’ rights be hijacked by such an extreme minority.”

These efforts are emerging as red states have passed a wave of new laws restricting how classroom teachers can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as measures making it easier for critics to pressure schools to remove books from classrooms and libraries. Partly in response to those new statutes, the number of banned books has jumped by about 30 percent in the first half of the current school year as compared with last, according to a recent compilation by PEN America, a free-speech group founded by notable authors.

To the frustration of some local activists opposing these measures in state legislatures or school boards, the Biden administration has largely kept its distance from these fights. Nor did Democrats, while they controlled Congress, mount any sustained resistance to the educational constraints spreading across the red states.

But the events of the past few weeks suggest that this debate has clearly reached a turning point. From grassroots organizers like Paris to political advisers for Biden, more Democrats see book bans as the weak link in the GOP’s claim that it is upholding “parents’ rights” through measures such as restrictions on curriculum or legislation targeting transgender minors. A national CBS poll released on Monday found overwhelming opposition among Americans to banning books that discuss race or criticize U.S. history. “There is something about this idea of book banning that really makes people stop and say, ‘I may be uncomfortable with some of this transitional treatment kids are getting, and I don’t know how I feel about pronouns, but I do not want them banning books,’” says Guy Molyneux, a Democratic pollster.

The conservative call to uphold parents’ rights in education has intensified since Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin in 2021 unexpectedly won the governorship in blue-leaning Virginia partly behind that theme. In the aftermath of long COVID-related shutdowns across many school districts, Youngkin’s victory showed that “Republicans really did tap into an energy there” by talking about ways of “giving parents more of a choice in education,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who specializes in family issues, told me.

But as the parents’-rights crusade moved through Republican-controlled states, it quickly expanded well beyond academic concerns to encompass long-standing conservative complaints that liberal teachers were allegedly indoctrinating kids through “woke” lessons.

New red-state laws passed in response to those arguments have moved the fight over book banning from a retail to a wholesale level. Previously, most book bans were initiated by lone parents, even if they were working with national conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, who objected to administrators or school boards in individual districts. But the new statutes have “supercharged” the book-banning process, in PEN’s phrase, by empowering critics to simultaneously demand the removal of more books in more places.Five red states— Florida, Texas, Missouri, South Carolina, and Utah— have now become the epicenter of book-banning efforts, the study concluded.

Biden and his administration were not entirely silent as these policies proliferated. He was clear and consistent in denouncing the initial “Don’t Say Gay” law that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis passed to bar discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades. But that was the exception. Even during the 2022 campaign, when Biden regularly framed Republicans as a threat to voting and abortion rights, he did not highlight red-state book bans and curriculum censorship. Apart from abortion and voting, his inclination has been to focus his public communications less on culture-war disputes than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to working families. Nor had Education Secretary Miguel Cardona done much to elevate these issues either. “We have not seen a lot of visibility” from the Education Department, says Nadine Farid Johnson, PEN’s managing director for Washington.

The administration’s relative disengagement from the classroom wars, and the limited attention from national progressive groups, left many grassroots activists feeling “isolated,” Paris said. Revida Rahman, a co-founder of One WillCo, an organization that advocates for students of color in affluent and predominantly white Williamson County, south of Nashville, told me that the group has often felt at a disadvantage trying to respond to conservative parents working with national right-leaning groups to demand changes in curriculum or bans on books with racial or LGBTQ themes. “What we are fighting is a well-funded and well-oiled machine,” she told me, “and we don’t have the same capacity.”

Pushback from Democrats and their allies, though, is now coalescing. Earlier this month, the Freedom to Learn initiative, a coalition organized mostly by Black educators, held a series of events, many on college campuses, protesting restrictions on curriculum and books. The Red Wine and Blue group is looking to organize a systematic grassroots response. Founded in 2019, the organization has about 500,000 mostly suburban mothers in its network and paid organizers in five states. The group has already provided training for local activists to oppose curriculum censorship and book bans, and today it is launching the Freedom to Parent 21st Century Kids project, a more sweeping counter to conservative parents’-rights groups. The project will include virtual training sessions for activists, programs in which participants can talk with transgender kids and their parents, and efforts to highlight banned books. “We want to equip parents to talk about this stuff,” Paris told me. “It’s moms learning from moms who already faced this in their community.”

Illinois opened another front in this debate with its first-in-the-nation bill to discourage book banning. The legislation will withhold state grants from school districts unless they adopt explicit policies to prohibit banning books in response to partisan or ideological pressure. Democratic Governor J. B. Pritzker has indicated that he will sign the bill.

Potentially the most consequential shift has come from the Biden administration. The president signaled a new approach in his late-April announcement video, when he cited book bans as evidence for his accusation that Republicans in the Donald Trump era are targeting Americans’ “personal freedom.” That was, “by far, the most we have seen on” book bans from Biden, Farid Johnson told me.

One senior adviser close to Biden told me that the connection of book bans to those more frequent presidential targets of abortion and democracy was no accident. “There is a basic American pushback when people are told what they can and cannot do,” said the adviser, who asked for anonymity while discussing campaign strategy. “Voters,” the adviser said, “don’t like to be told, ‘You can’t make a decision about your own life when it comes to your health care; you can’t make a decision about what book to read.’ I think book bans fit in that broader context.”

Biden may sharpen that attack as soon as Saturday, when he delivers the commencement address at Howard University. Meanwhile, Vice President Harris has already previewed how the administration may flesh out this argument. In her own speech at Howard last month, she cited book bans and curriculum censorship as components of a red-state social regime that the GOP will try to impose nationwide if it wins the White House in 2024. In passing these laws, Republicans are not just “impacting the people” of Florida or Texas, she said. “What we are witnessing— and be clear about this— is there is a national agenda that’s at play … Don’t think it’s not a national agenda when they start banning books.”

The Education Department has also edged into the fray. When the recent release of national test scores showed a decline in students’ performance on history, Cardona, the education secretary, issued a statement declaring that “banning history books and censoring educators … does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction.”

His statement came months after the department’s Office of Civil Rights launched an investigation that could shape the next stages of this struggle. The office is probing whether a Texas school district that sweepingly removed LGBTQ-themed books from its shelves has violated federal civil-rights laws. The department has not revealed anything about the investigation’s status, but PEN’s Farid Johnson said if it concludes that the removals violated federal law, other districts might be deterred from banning books.

The politics of the parents’-rights debate are complex. Republicans are confident that their interconnected initiatives related to education and young people can win back suburban voters, especially mothers, who have rejected the party in the Trump era. Polling, including surveys done by Democratic pollsters last year for the American Federation of Teachers, has consistently found majority national support for some individual planks in the GOP agenda, including the prohibitions on discussing sexual orientation in early grades.

Brown said he believes that at the national level, the battle over book bans is likely to end in a “stalemate.” That’s not only, he argued, because each side can point to examples of extreme behavior by the other in defending or removing individual books, but also because views on what’s acceptable for kids vary so much from place to place. “We shouldn’t expect a national consensus on what book is appropriate for a 13-year-old to be reading, because that’s going to be different among different parents in different communities,” Brown told me.

Yet as the awakening Democratic resistance suggests, many in the party are confident that voters will find the whole of the GOP agenda less attractive than the sum of its parts. In that 2022 polling for the teachers’ union, a significant majority of adults said they worry less that kids are being taught values their parents don’t like than that culture-war fights are diverting schools from their real mission of educating students. Paris said the most common complaint she hears from women drawn to her group is that the conservative activists proclaiming parents’ rights are curtailing the freedoms of other parents by trying to dictate what materials all students can access. “What you’ll have women in our communities say all the time is ‘If you don’t want your kid to read a book, that’s fine, but you don’t get to decide for me and my family,’” she told me.

The White House, the senior official told me, believes that after the Supreme Court last year rescinded the right to abortion, many voters are uncertain and uneasy about what rights or liberties Republicans may target next. “There is a fear about Where does it stop?,” the official said, and book bans powerfully crystallize that concern. Trump and DeSantis, who’s expected to join the GOP race, have both indicated that they intend to aggressively advance the conservative parents’-rights agenda of attacks on instruction they deem “woke” and books they consider indecent. Biden and other Democrats, after months of hesitation, are stepping onto the field against them. The library looms as the next big confrontation in the culture war.

This book-banning brouhaha is all part of the dogged-- and well-funded-- conservative effort to capture American culture and for them it isn't about this season or cycle of even decade. They're in it for the long-run. And we've got to elect people to office who will fight them in that long run-- like these state legislative candidates and these congressional candidates. And these stalwart incumbents who have already proven their worth.