A wise person once said that you can judge the humanity of a society by how it treats its prisoners. I believe that you can also judge the commitment of a community to democratic cultural access by the budget of its libraries.
Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s famously left-leaning mayor, is proposing a dramatic cut in the Chicago Public Library’s collections budget and the permanent elimination of current vacancies at CPL. If you’ve been to a library recently and had a long wait to speak to someone, or if you’ve been waiting for a month for the latest Dan Brown page-turner to be delivered from another branch, that’s the status quo, and Johnson’s vision for the city includes making that situation permanent.
“Year after year, frontline library employees are being asked to do more and more with less and less,” Nick Ayala told a group of reporters at a press conference at the beginning of November, as ably reported by Block Club Chicago‘s Quinn Myers. The budget calls for eliminating all vacant positions and cutting the collections budget in half, which is how the library pays for not only books, but also digital subscriptions and access to other resources.
When Johnson was running for office, the left-leaning intelligentsia were in thrall to the prospect of a Black, liberal political leader in Chicago. Essays were churned out; lefty social media was endlessly chattering; and his sponsors, the Chicago Teachers’ Union, burned through millions of dollars in dues and deployed their considerable army of door-knockers to ensure that his bid was successful. When he won, the progressive community was ecstatic.
And then it was time to govern. Basking in the promises of a political campaign is not unlike devouring three Stan’s plain glazed donuts in rapid succession (don’t ask me how I know this): the pleasure of the act is unquestionable, the high immediately after is real and beautiful, and the hangover afterward almost — almost — makes the exercise in self-indulgence not worth it.
In year one, Johnson increased the Chicago Police Department’s budget. When Black communities where he was establishing shelters for migrants asked for resources to accommodate their new neighbors, they got the cold shoulder. And now, as the halfway point of his first term has passed and challengers have begun to emerge, every step he takes is under increasing scrutiny.
Which brings us to budget season. Sadly, all American politicians become capitalists during budget season. Johnson’s spokesperson, Cassio Mendoza, essentially threatened library closures if the vacant positions were not eliminated.
“Strategically reducing vacant positions prevents the need for library closures, reduced hours, or staff layoffs,” Mendoza said in a statement, fully pretending the libraries are some isolated line item and there is no other place money can come from.
It is a little depressing to have to write the words “public libraries matter” in a column about city budgets, to be honest. But analyzing the cultural origins of that antipathy will have to wait. Now, I want to focus on the access to knowledge that every library affords the most under-resourced people in our city. We do not provide shelter for all who need it; we don’t even feed everyone. The absolute least we can do is give people a chance to provide for themselves, and in 2025, that means universal access to information technology. (I will also wait for another time to talk about the transcendental importance of literature.)
A fundamental challenge with democratic governance is that, once elected, many people tend to avoid public services. They don’t take the bus anywhere. They don’t send their kids to public school. They don’t take books out of the library. In general, there is a hostility towards free services for the public that seems to be baked into contemporary American political culture; in cities as segregated as Chicago, that intolerance tends to be even more pronounced.
Governance is a balancing act, and we always want our version of the city to be the priority of the elected, just like millions of other people do. But there is something especially bleak about America’s version of people-centered politics turning into hamfisted threats and anti-intellectual budget choices. There are lots and lots of ways we could balance the budget in Chicago, starting with the odious and anti-public Tax Increment Financing system, shifting liability for lethal police abuse to the perpetrators; and cutting the police budget, which swallows the lion’s share of the city’s revenue while police make fewer and fewer arrests every year, but continue to cost us millions in lawsuits for wrongful deaths.
Katrina vanden Heuvel, in an essay arguing for public libraries in The Nation, described them as “egalitarian living rooms.” I love that metaphor. The city’s CyberNetwork Technology Tutors program works with patrons to help them master the technology that increasingly serves to isolate as much or more than it includes. Those who cannot afford technology at home nevertheless can be a part of the virtual world that takes up more and more of our civic space because of the library. As of this writing, in 2025 alone, there have been more than 3.28 million internet sessions at public libraries across Chicago.
The mayor’s efforts to balance the budget have been met with stiff opposition from City Council, with the finance committee rejecting it 25-10 vote. That’s bad news for the mayor, but it could be good news for library supporters. The key will be whether people are willing to put in a little work for one of the city’s most socialist institutions, now threatened by a mayor who was carried into office in part through a wave of left-wing supporters.
You would be surprised how much a simple phone call to your alderperson matters. If you know who represents you in City Council, you can find their phone number here. If you need to look them up based on your address, you can do that here. Everybody complains about city government, but fewer people than you might think bother to make a phone call about an issue that is important to them. That’s a little sad, but it also means your call will matter even more.
You can bet that few, if any, of those 25 votes against the budget had anything to do with libraries, but that’s okay. Once any vote enters a negotiation phase, as this one now has, an opportunity for all sorts of proposals emerges. If library lovers organize and start making calls to alderpeople, restoring library funding could become part of the changes made in order to get support for a new budget.
