In public libraries and schools throughout the country, the argument is being advanced that government-run libraries should be floating fiefdoms with no accountability to anyone.

I t’s Banned Books Week, the celebration of blue-haired librarians cosplaying as champions of the First Amendment against evil conservatives who dare question the appropriateness of sexually explicit, pro-trans literature for five-year-olds. To summarize some of the silliness ably highlighted by NR’s Vahaken Mouradian on the subject: No “Banned Book” in America is actually banned; we still have an operative First Amendment, and every book on the American Library Association’s list of the top ten “Challenged Books” of 2024 is readily available on Amazon or at thousands of libraries and bookstores throughout the country. ALA’s “Banned Books” appellation gets applied not merely to books that are actually removed from library shelves, but to books that receive mere complaints or “challenges,” in the ALA’s parlance.

But there’s an underdiscussed element to “Banned Books Week” and its focus on “challenges”: an anti-democratic streak. In public libraries and schools throughout the country, the argument is being advanced that government-run libraries should be floating fiefdoms with no accountability to anyone: not the taxpayers, not the voters, not the representatives whom they elect to run libraries. The “Banned Books” debate is yet another front in the war between ordinary citizens and the professional managerial class.

In its pretentiously titled “State of America’s Libraries” for 2025, the American Library Association chose to highlight a curious and revelatory statistic. They complain that 72 percent of book complaints and challenges in 2024 came from “pressure groups and government entities that include elected officials, board members and administrators.” A further 16 percent of complaints came from parents, and 12 percent came from library users, teachers, librarians, or staff members.

The decision to lump government officials together with “pressure groups” is curious. They don’t seem like similar categories. The figure was broken down to 10 percent from “elected officials/government,” 26 percent from “pressure groups,” 36 percent from “board/administration.”

Public libraries are, by definition, organs of some governmental entity: a city, a county, or a public school district. All of those entities are governed by elected officials: mayors, city councils, county boards of supervisors, school boards, etc. In America, political authority flows from the people to their elected officials, who oversee local jurisdictions and programs they administer, like libraries.

Elected officials or their library-overseeing appointees who dispute curation decisions are engaged in internal oversight as part of a popular mandate and duty to run the taxpaying voters’ library. A complaint from a “pressure group” could be external, and could fairly be viewed as having less weight than critiques from the people’s representatives, especially if the group was largely composed of persons from outside the relevant jurisdiction. But otherwise, government officials are to “pressure groups” as apples are to oranges.

Yet lefty librarians seem to view both as interlopers. Why? Because they believe that the “expertise” of unelected librarians should not be questioned, that it is inappropriate for non-librarians to butt in with their opinions. These unelected government employees view the elected representatives who oversee their jobs as an external nuisance — the same way they see outside pressure groups as a nuisance.

This war of alleged technocratic expertise versus popular, electoral accountability has been raging in my hometown in California. The Fresno County Board of Supervisors (three of whose five elected members are conservative Republicans) recently passed legislation to create a citizens’ commission to review library curation decisions in response to parents and supervisors complaining about sexually inappropriate materials aimed at very young children. The State of California swiftly outlawed such commissions, keeping maximal power in the hands of progressive county employee-librarians.

This year, in response to complaints about the persistent Pride Month displays within children’s sections of the county libraries, the Fresno County Supervisors passed further legislation restricting which holidays the libraries could commemorate with displays and decorations. They also ended LGBT-specific library activities and limited the (reliably left-wing) social media presence of individual library branches.

The howls of outrage from the left over these decisions were predictable, and much of it was grounded in the premise that the county supervisors should stay out of the librarians’ expert-level work, that librarians’ “administrative discretion” should be respected. The upshot is that the supervisors — whom the people elected specifically to supervise county institutions — should simply allow their own unelected employees, the librarians, to do things that neither the supervisors nor the voters want.

This is a phenomenon that’s hardly unique to California. The same story is being played out across the country. PBS has published several pieces dripping with resentment for citizen critiques of libraries, holding up librarians as bearers of the flame of freedom. The “swamp” — the stagnant pool of left-wing, career “expert” employees within the federal government who undermine Republican presidencies — is also a reality within city and county governments throughout the country, where local government workers are just as left-wing as their federal counterparts.

Trusting librarians would make more sense if the First Amendment required them to stock these disputed books. But it largely just isn’t implicated. Deciding that a book is or is not appropriate for a youthful audience, whether for sexually mature themes or literary quality, is a simple question of library curation that does not implicate the normative values enshrined in the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

Libraries should not be left to the whims of activists from the professional managerial class who get their salaries from the very taxpayers they disdain.