It Often Starts with Book Banning or Burning

Germany



United States (1958)

                                   

If Biden can find a path to stem the inflation over which he had no direct control – a result of Putin’s war impacting fuel, commodities and shipping, Trump era tax cuts, and cheap fed money adjusted upwards too hard and too late – that would leave the GOP with a series of repressive rulings from its radicalized Supreme Court appointees and a made-up problem for which the GOP has the solution: culture wars.

They call it avoiding blame for what happened way back when (but racism is alive and growing), parental control over what their children are exposed to and letting cops do what they have always done… before bodycams. All those generations of Americans who read those books, in public schools and libraries, didn’t seem to grow up scarred by the process. But all of a sudden, a minority of White Christian nationalists sees how close to total power over the nation they have achieved, so why not kick it up a notch?

Call it personal liberty, even though you are taking choice away from women, minorities and exposing everyday Americans to unstable hooligans who, despite the best background checks imaginable (which we still don’t have), can easily access at least one of the estimated 20 million US AR-15s, the sale of which have made gunmakers rich. This populist GOP is on the wrong side of public opinion on most of these issues – particularly abortion and gun control. Income inequality – based on GOP tax and regulatory cuts – has never been worse in this country. So, if inflation subsides, if the new $369 billion climate-directed legislation pending in Congress infuses working class Americans with more jingle in their pockets, that usual mid-term loss to the incumbent party (the Dems) just might not happen. It would come down to how important culture wars are to voters.

Historically, when a clearly denoted powerful demographic segment within a nation defines itself in terms of racial, ethnic or religious purity, you get a “races shouldn’t mix” autocracy a la Viktor Orban’s Hungary, the long-past system of apartheid in South Africa, the religious theocracy of Iran, the genocide of Rwanda and Myanmar, Hitler’s genocidal reign against Jews, America’s bout with slavery followed by the Jim Crow era and continuing into the modern era where Mexicans seeking entry into the US are “rapists and criminals,” where Asians are blamed for COVID, where Jewish temples and Muslim mosques are defaced, sometimes their worshipers attacked and killed and where radical elected officials laud uniformed and armed White supremacists as “patriots” and where Black Americans continue to be disproportionately killed, even when unarmed, in moments of conflict or misunderstanding with local police. One of the most consistent early indicators of such rising autocracies is banning (or burning) books that do not jibe with the rising minority’s perspective on what national values must be.

Writing for the July 31st New York Times, journalist Claire Moses enlists some of her peers (notably Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris who cover the publishing industry) in telling interviews dealing with this sensitive subject: “Book-banning attempts have grown in the U.S. over the past few years from relatively isolated battles to a broader effort aimed at works about sexual and racial identity…

“Alexandra: We’ve seen this going from a school or community issue to a really polarizing political issue. Before, parents might hear about a book because their child brought a copy home; now, complaints on social media about inappropriate material go viral, and that leads to more complaints in schools and libraries across the country.

“Elected officials are also turning book banning into another wedge issue in the culture wars. Last fall, a Republican representative in Texas put together a list of 850 books that he argued were inappropriate material in schools and included books about sexuality, racism and American history. In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin campaigned on the issue by arguing that parents, not schools, should control what their children read. Democrats have also seized on the issue through congressional hearings about rising book bans…

“Elizabeth: Book banning is part of a wider political context right now, of extreme polarization, of heightened political tensions and the amplification of certain messages by the kinds of media — social or otherwise — that people consume…

“In Virginia Beach, a local politician sued Barnes & Noble over two books, ‘Gender Queer,’ a memoir by Maia Kobabe, and ‘A Court of Mist and Fury,’ a fantasy novel. This lawmaker wants Barnes & Noble to stop selling these titles to minors. The suit probably won’t succeed. But it’s an escalation: The issue went from people thinking their children shouldn’t read certain books to trying to stop other people’s children from reading certain books.”

These red state statutes banning critical race/gender theory (CRT) books and teaching in public schools and libraries are fraught with ambiguities, expose competent teachers to serious disciplinary risks, and result in self-censorship or often left to the vagaries of the local school district. And the United States has about 13,000 school districts to compound the problem.

Almost always, there is a Christian nationalist agenda working where local school districts seem to care more about banning their vision of CRT texts from their schools than in preparing children for the real world. While a few of these legal measures focus on younger students, somehow the bans ultimately seem to apply across the board. While a majority of red state voters have been convinced that anti-CRT statutes are necessary, 71% of red state parents with school-aged children have not. The First Amendment issues, the intrusion of the state into the personal beliefs and the expression of those beliefs, and the held-in-the-sand ostrich approach to racial inequities that are far from dissipated tell us exactly how bigoted and wrong-headed these culture wars are. But if it is White Christian nationalism that Americans really believe is a better form of government than democracy, we just might get to witness that fall into autocracy very, very soon.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there are too many Americans unwilling to accept the stark lessons of history, marching headlong into a self-inflicted end of American democracy.