[ Potentially the most consequential shift has come from the Biden
administration.]
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THE BOOK-BANS DEBATE HAS FINALLY REACHED A TURNING POINT  
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Ronald Brownstein
May 10, 2023
The Atlantic
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_ Potentially the most consequential shift has come from the Biden
administration. _

, Bryan Anselm / The New York Times / Redux

 

Across multiple fronts, Democrats and their allies are stiffening
their resistance to a surge of Republican-led book bans.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the past month
have conspicuously escalated their denunciations of the book bans
proliferating in schools across the country, explicitly linking them
to restrictions on abortion and voting rights to make the case that
“MAGA extremists” are threatening Americans’ “personal
freedom,” as Biden said in the recent video
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for a second term.

Last week, Illinois became the first Democratic-controlled state to
pass legislation designed to discourage local school districts from
banning books. And a prominent grassroots progressive group today will
announce a new national campaign to organize mothers against the
conservative drive to remove books and censor curriculum under the
banner of protecting “parents’ rights.”

“We are not going to let the mantle of parents’ rights be hijacked
by such an extreme minority,” Katie Paris, the founder of the group,
Red Wine and Blue, told me.

These efforts are emerging as red states have passed a wave of new
laws
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
[[link removed]], 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 [[link removed]], 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

_Ronald Brownstein
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editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst for CNN._

* Book Banning
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* U.S. citizens fightback
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* Joe Biden
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