A tiny rural county of just over 20,000 people north of Austin, Texas has become an iconic battleground in a “book war” conservatives are waging against what they call the indoctrination of children by liberals.
Llano County must decide, Thursday, April 13, the fate of the three libraries in the region. The authorities, which lean overwhelmingly to the right, want to close them so as not to have to follow a federal court judgment asking them to reinstate a dozen children’s books that had been banned.
Republicans Against the Whoopee Snowman
Books like “Freddie the farting snowman”, “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health” growing up, sex and sexual health) or even a history book on the racist Ku Klux Klan movement have disappeared from library shelves since the end of 2021.
In April 2022, several parents of students challenged the decree which censored access to these books, arguing that this measure was contrary to the principle of freedom of expression. Almost a year of legal battle later, a federal judge ruled in their favor.
But the authorities do not admit defeat. Very upset, Bonnie Wallace, vice-director of the county library board, assured that she would do everything to prevent “that pornographic filth [sic] in the children’s book sections”.
The county is therefore seriously considering closing all libraries to prevent children from following the adventures of a whooping snowman or reading a book that explains why the KKK can be considered a terrorist organization.
It would then be a new stage in what the American media calls the “children’s book war” that is raging in the United States. Because the face-to-face between the conservatives and those who oppose this censorship goes far beyond the borders of the county of Llano.
There are at least 32 states (out of 50) where “school boards” — organizations that run a district’s public schools — have had certain books censored. “It has become one of the main battles fought by the conservative camp against what they call the ‘woke’ ideology [terme désignant pour les conservateurs l’ensemble des valeurs libérales, NDLR]”, underlines Richard Hargy, specialist in the policy of the United States at the Queen’ S University of Belfast.
A little air of McCarthyism?
Most of the books targeted by this censorship address the issue of sexual identity and the rights of LGBTQ+ communities, racism and issues of police violence. Literary stars, such as Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, or John Steinbeck, the author of “Grapes of Wrath”, are on the list of writers most targeted by its new master censors.
“The current political sequence is reminiscent in certain aspects of what happened in the 1950s and 1960s”, underlines Tamara Boussac, specialist in the United States at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. This is not the first time that the education of children has been turned into a political weapon by the conservatives. “In the name of the fight against communism, the republicans at the time of McCarthyism [chasse aux communistes dans les années 1950] also called for ‘protecting children’ by banning certain works”, continues Tamara Boussac.
“There has often been a tendency to underestimate the role of education issues in the process of mobilizing conservative voters in modern America,” notes Robert Mason, a scholar of American politics and the history of the Republican Party at Edinburgh University.
The content of the courses given to the little ones has “always been a way for the conservatives to try to seduce the electorate at the local level”, affirms this specialist. Even today “school boards are very important places of politicization that the conservatives seek to invest”, specifies Tamara Boussac.
“The offensives to infiltrate these local institutions are very well organized and often supported by wealthy Republican donors,” says Richard Hargy. The conservatives know, in fact, that it is necessary to start by making noise in the schools to then facilitate “the acceptance of this debate at the federal or national level”, explains Tamara Boussac.
Distract the Republican electorate from economic issues
Because that is the goal of the conservatives with this “battle of the books”: to make the issues of “culture war” – around LGBTQ+ rights or racial equality – dominate the political debate until the next election.
“All of this is a great political sleight of hand to distract the Republican electorate from other substantive issues such as the party’s economic program,” says Thomas Greven, a specialist in American politics at the University of Bonn.
The Republicans have, in fact, a fundamental problem: the typical voter of the party is increasingly a white man, poorly educated and from working-class backgrounds. “It is exactly the category of the population that will suffer the most from the economic and social consequences of the policies promoted by the Republicans. They must therefore do everything so that these voters do not realize it”, analyzes Thomas Greven.
Hence the emphasis placed on the “danger” that would represent for the education of children books which would be, according to these Republicans, filled with “woke” ideology. “Pushing this narrative gives activists a reason to be angry,” summarizes Thomas Greven. And an angry voter is a voter who thinks less.
The Republicans aren’t afraid to take this book war very far, even threatening to shut down all libraries, like in Llano County. They have, in fact, found that this credo was carrying: “One of the main contenders for the nomination of the Republican Party for the next presidential election and also one of the main promoters of this rhetoric: Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida”, concludes Richard Hargy. He had adopted in his State a law in March 2023 which obliges a “specialist” to check all the books that can be made available to children.
