By IAN BURUMA

America is banning books at a frantic pace. According to PEN America, 1,648 were banned from public schools across the country between July 2021 and June 2022. The number is expected to rise this year as conservative politicians and organizations intensify their efforts to censor works dealing with the sexual and racial identity.

Republican-controlled states such as Florida and Utah have cracked down on school libraries in recent months, banning works dealing with race, gender and sexual issues, such as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Anti-Racist and Gender . Queer: An Autobiography , by Maia Kobabe. In some areas of Florida, schools were told to limit access to books on race and diversity, and warned that teachers who share «obscene and pornographic materials» with students could be sentenced to five years in prison. In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster pointed to Kobabe’s book —which in 2020 won the American Library Association’s Alex Award for Young Adult Literature—as an example of «obscene and pornographic materials.»

The current book bans are driven primarily by right-wing populist politicians and parent groups who claim to protect healthy, family-oriented Christian communities from the decay of urban America. By definition, children’s books with LGBTQ+ characters fall under their definition of pornography.

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and likely presidential candidate, may be the leading advocate of state censorship and modern book bans. Last month DeSantis and his allies in the State House of Representatives introduced a new bill that would prohibit universities and colleges of higher learning from supporting activities on campus that «advocate the rhetoric of diversity, equity and inclusion, or critical race theory. The proposal also seeks to remove critical race theory, gender studies, and intersectional discrimination, as well as any «derivations, large or small, of those belief systems» from the academic curriculum.

But while progressives on the left make fewer calls to ban books, they can also be intolerant of literature that offends them: classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been removed from some school reading lists for their racist comments and because they can «marginalize» certain readers.

Certainly the right’s offensive against academic freedom is more dangerous than the left’s literary allergies. What is interesting, however, is how much bigotry on the left and bigotry on the right have in common. Right-wing populists like DeSantis tend to ape progressive rhetoric about «inclusivity» and «sensitivity» in the classroom. White students should be protected, they say, from learning about slavery or the role of white supremacy in American history because it might upset them and make them feel guilty.

Progressives who want to stop Huckleberry Finn from being taught in schools or demand that words like «fat» be removed from Roald Dahl’s children’s books follow the same logic. They also do not want children to feel offended or «that they are too much.» His idea of education is similar to therapy: the goal is for children to feel good about themselves, not for them to learn to absorb information and think for themselves.

Right-wing imitation of left-wing jargon can be understood as a form of revenge in bad faith. After all, the driving force for conservative puritanism in America was always fundamentalism, not inclusion. But religious dogmatism is closely linked to the fear of being offended. The controversy following the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 is a clear example. In addition to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for the author’s death, Christian conservatives condemned Rushdie for mocking religion. Some members of the left, even without belonging to any religion, criticized Rushdie for offending millions of Muslims.

Christian Puritans oppose gay-themed books not just because the Bible forbids homosexuality, but also (and perhaps primarily) because they violate what they consider to be the natural order. This is not all that different from the sentiment of the thousands of people who recently signed a letter protesting the coverage of transgender issues in the New York Times . The signatories were upset that some articles assumed that the gender question could not be solved scientifically. One of them, written by columnist Pamela Paul in defense of JK Rowling, is particularly offensive. Rowling doesn’t hate gender changers, but she doesn’t believe that being a woman or a man is simply something you choose.

Progressives calling for a ban on Rowling’s Harry Potter books (which were also denounced by right-wing fans for promoting witchcraft ) are not doing so entirely on religious grounds. Again, they talk about inhospitable workplaces, marginalization, callousness, etc., but they are often just as dogmatic as religious believers. They are convinced that someone born with male genitalia is female if he/she claims so. To doubt this conviction, as Rowling does, violates her view of nature.

This is not to suggest that threats to student access to books from the left are as serious as those from the extreme right. Unlike far-right parties, including the Republican Party today, left-of-center politicians don’t typically call for the state to implement legal bans. Still, some progressive rhetoric is giving advantages to the populist right.

Lacking a coherent economic platform, the Republican Party turned headlong into America’s culture war, but since the appeal of religious and social conservatives tends to win far more favor with voters than dogmatic stances on racial sexual identities, this It doesn’t look like a war that the left is going to win. Democrats and other progressive parties in the Western world would do well to focus less on hurt sensibilities and more on the economic and political interests of voters.

*Original text published by Project Syndicate.