'Conservatives' out to destroy an institution that has defined civilization for 3,000 years

When an exiled Athenian philosopher brought an idea for a new building to one of Alexander the Great’s successors around 300 BC, the proposal met with almost immediate approval. When that building finally opened a few decades later, the Great Library at Alexandria helped to define the city as the center of knowledge and learning for centuries. Even that library was far from the first. Other libraries, dating back at least half a millennium, served as both engines of scholarship and commerce. Libraries go back to a time when their contents were inscribed in cuneiform on tablets of baked clay.

In the New World, the story of libraries usually turns to Benjamin Franklin. However, the Biblioteca Palafoxiana in Mexico opened almost a century before Franklin raised the funds to found the Library Company of Philadelphia. The first free public library in the United States was founded in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1833, and after that they proliferated across the nation. In town after town, city after city, the first two public structures were a public school and a public library. Those institutions aren’t just artifacts of civilization; they are its defining elements.

Now these institutions are under attack by Republicans. That includes a Missouri bill that removes all state funding for libraries, and the superintendent of a Virginia school district moving to eliminate school libraries completely. This is the second stage of the assault on information that Republicans opened with a wave of bills making it easier to ban books both in school libraries and public libraries. Because, just like Donald Trump, the Republican Party loves the poorly educated. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it certainly makes people easier to control.