The Democrats’ ‘Book Ban’ Fiction Is Pure Projection

T he idea that Republicans are busily banning books in the states over which they preside has apparently become an article of the faith among the Democratic nominating convention’s attendees.

According to the self-described independent voter Oprah Winfrey, Republicans believe that “books are dangerous.” The GOP is “banning books from their schools,” Tim Walz maintained. Pete Buttigieg urged voters to “embrace the leaders who are out there building bridges and reject the ones who are out there banning books.” Our kids cannot be prepared “for the future” if Republicans continue “banning our books,” Michelle Obama posited. And so on. Speaker after speaker made the supposition without bothering to support the charge. Indeed, why waste the time when the audience is already on board and the press can be relied on to dutifully stenograph the accusation without a hint of incredulity?

For conservatives, this is threadbare stuff. There is no shortage of pieces on this website and in other conservative media outlets that have established the not particularly fine distinction between an outright book ban and the selection of relevant materials (some of which are wholly inappropriate for minors) that Republican lawmakers, with the backing of their constituents, have sought to withdraw from publicly funded institutions. There’s a good reason Democrats seem incapable of specifying which books are supposedly being banned. Going into too much detail about that sort of explicit content just wouldn’t do for a family-friendly show like the Democratic National Convention.

We’ve already engaged in more critical thought on this subject than Democrats and the press (a distinction with increasingly little difference) would prefer. When they seek to identify exactly what Republicans are supposedly banning, they include in their complaints such things as the removal of non-pertinent material or even weather-damaged books from universities’ library collections — in the hope that you won’t read all the way down to the throat-clearing paragraph that would render the reasons for their latest outrage banal and innocuous. The temptation to bend the facts to fit their provocative narrative is understandable. Schools’ merely moving a book from one shelf to another, or labeling works with an “advisor notice to parents” — the bulk of what constitutes the “state-sponsored purging of ideas and identities,” according to the hyperventilating activist — just isn’t scandalizing enough.

The uncomplicated notion that Republicans are censoring literature because they are consumed with hate is all you’re required to internalize. The notion of GOP-inspired “book bans” has become a catechism — the rote recitation of which is all that is expected of you. Don’t think too hard about it. After all, no one else did.

If Democrats cannot comprehend the measures Republican lawmakers have taken to withdraw from educational environments lewd material or works of dubious scholarship that no longer pertain to the curriculum, the GOP can help by employing the euphemism that left-wing activists often use when they want to strip dangerous reading material from impressionable hands. Don’t call it a “book ban.” Call it “book de-emphasizing.”

That is the genteelism deployed by the political activists who masquerade as library-science experts, ensconced in left-leaning institutions such as the American Library Association and its house publication, School Library Journal. “What to do with ‘classic’ books that are also racist and hurtful to students?” pondered Marva Hinton in the SLJ in 2020. The question was occasioned by the ALA’s recommendation that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name be stripped from an eponymous literary award because the “dated cultural attitudes” explored in the Little House on the Prairie series offend modern sensibilities and could radicalize students. The same could be (and has been) said of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay, and Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, among other classics. Questions around the “cultural appropriateness” of these books led school systems in America’s bluest enclaves to boot these and other titles from the curricula while Ron DeSantis was just another congressman.

And yet, this is not censorship. “There’s a lot of area in between taking a book off the shelf and de-emphasizing it,” said Andy Spinks, a library-media specialist at a Georgia high school. He’s right about that. After all, Spinks continued, “problematic books also often meet the criteria for weeding” — the term of art that describes updates to a library’s collection, which became a disreputable practice only when Democratic political imperatives demanded that it be so.

Democrats perhaps don’t believe that Republicans read the periodicals that flatter the Left’s sensibilities. But some of us do, and so we remember a slavishly favorable New York Times Magazine profile of a Princeton University professor of classical literature who despises classical literature — material that is, according to him, “instrumental to the invention of ‘whiteness’ and its continued domination” and must be “deemphasized.”

Do they think we missed the effort to consign William Golding’s Lord of the Flies to obscurity lest we expose students to a story surrounding the devolution of “elite, upper-class, private school [students] who are white, cisgender, European males,” all predicated on the prejudicial fear that young white men who read the book would resolve to throw off the trappings of civilization and murder one another? Do they think we never encountered the so-called Disrupt Texts movement, which set out to anathematize the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel Hawthorne and even Homer’s Odyssey? And all based on a shockingly pedestrian interpretation of these works that begins and ends with a control-f search for naughty words? Even in Tim Walz’s paradisical Minnesota, some of the suspect works named above were “de-emphasized” when that was the fashion.

You can fairly call this outbreak of judgmentalism a moral panic, and many of its participants seem embarrassed by their association with it. Maybe that critique fairly applies to some of the Right’s reaction to the vapidity that passes for “anti-racist” literature (though certainly not for what amounts to pornography in schools). But you cannot call what the Left engaged in a “book ban,” because anyone who wanted to get their hands on classic American literature always could. That is true, too, of the books that Democrats so casually allege have been “banned” by the GOP’s prudish authoritarians.

The book-ban myth is just that. And when it served Democrats’ purposes, everyone knew the difference between curation and prohibition. Now that it doesn’t, a convenient amnesia has descended across the land. Consistency is an easy thing to sacrifice when the presidency is at stake.