Public Libraries Are Radical

Imagine Proposing This

Pitch the following to a city council in 2026: We're going to construct a building in every neighborhood. Climate-controlled. Open to everyone. No membership fee. No purchase required. You can walk in off the street (whether you're a CEO, an unhoused person, a kid skipping school, a retiree with nowhere else to go) and access the same resources. Books, computers, internet, databases, meeting rooms, quiet spaces. We'll staff it with professionals who have master's degrees and pay them to help anyone who asks, for free, with no judgment about what they want to know or why.

You'd be laughed out of the room. Or called a communist. Probably both.

And yet this institution already exists. It's the public library. There are roughly 17,000 of them in the United States. They're so familiar that their radicalism has become invisible.

What Libraries Actually Are

A public library is the last truly public space in most American communities. Not public in the way a mall is public, where you're welcome as long as you're spending money and not making anyone uncomfortable. Actually public. The kind of space where your right to be there doesn't depend on your ability to pay.

This matters more than it sounds like it should. Eric Klinenberg, the sociologist at NYU, calls libraries social infrastructure, the physical spaces that shape patterns of social interaction. In his book Palaces for the People, Klinenberg argues that when social infrastructure is robust, communities are more resilient, connected, and democratic. When it deteriorates, isolation and distrust fill the gap.

Libraries are the densest form of social infrastructure we have. A single branch library can function as a community center, a study hall, a job training site, a warming shelter, an internet access point, a meeting space for civic organizations, a literacy program, a children's program, an archive, and a reference desk, simultaneously. No other public institution provides this range of services to this breadth of population at this low a cost.

The New York Public Library system, for instance, serves over 30 million visitors per year across its 92 branches. The operating cost is about $20 per resident per year. Try getting that kind of return on investment from any other public expenditure.

The Carnegie Contradiction

The history of American public libraries is inseparable from Andrew Carnegie, which means it's inseparable from contradiction.

Carnegie funded the construction of over 1,600 libraries in the United States between 1883 and 1929. His philanthropy was genuine. His motives were complex. Carnegie was a self-educated immigrant who attributed his success partly to a private library that let him borrow books as a young man in Pittsburgh. He believed that access to information could lift people out of poverty the way it had (in his telling) lifted him.

But Carnegie's fortune came from the steel industry, and the steel industry ran on the exploitation of immigrant labor in conditions that killed and maimed workers routinely. The Homestead Strike of 1892 (in which Pinkerton agents hired by Carnegie's company opened fire on striking workers, killing seven) happened while Carnegie was donating libraries across the country.

This isn't a footnote. It's a structural feature of how public goods get created in a system built on private wealth. The library as we know it was funded by profits extracted from the people the library was ostensibly meant to serve. The gift and the exploitation came from the same source.

Acknowledging this doesn't mean the libraries shouldn't have been built. It means the model (depending on the philanthropy of the wealthy to create public institutions) is inherently unstable. What one robber baron builds, the next generation's austerity politics can defund. Public goods funded by private whim are not public goods at all. They're gifts that can be revoked.

The Quiet Transformation

Walk into a public library in 2026 and you'll find something that looks very different from the book repository of popular imagination.

Many libraries now have social workers on staff. Not because librarians decided to expand their job description for fun, but because libraries are where people in crisis show up. When someone is experiencing homelessness, they need a warm place to sit. When someone is navigating the bureaucracy of public assistance, they need an internet connection and help filling out forms. When someone is in a mental health crisis, they need a safe environment.

Libraries absorbed these functions because no one else would. The defunding of social services (mental health facilities, public housing programs, community centers) pushed vulnerable populations toward the few remaining public spaces. Libraries became the social safety net of last resort.

Denver Public Library hired a full-time social worker in 2015. The San Francisco Public Library followed. Now dozens of library systems across the country employ social workers, peer counselors, and outreach specialists. Some stock Narcan. Some provide laundry facilities. Some run needle exchange programs out of mobile library vans.

Is this what libraries are "supposed" to do? If your definition of a library begins and ends with books, no. But if a library is a public institution committed to serving its community, all of its community, including the members that every other institution has abandoned, then yes. This is exactly what libraries are supposed to do. They're the only institution still showing up.

Under Siege

Given what libraries represent, it should surprise no one that they're under attack.

Book banning attempts in the United States reached their highest level in decades in 2022 and 2023, according to the American Library Association. Most challenges target books dealing with race, gender identity, and sexuality. The pattern is transparent: the people challenging these books are not concerned about literary quality. They're concerned about the existence of information they'd prefer certain populations not have access to.

Funding is the slower, quieter attack. Public library funding in the U.S. has been essentially flat in inflation-adjusted terms for over a decade, even as demand for services has increased. In rural areas, branch closures are accelerating. In cities, deferred maintenance has left many library buildings in poor condition. Some systems have cut hours, reduced staff, or eliminated programs.

This is how you destroy a public institution without appearing to. You don't shut it down. You starve it. You cut its funding until it can't function properly, then point to its dysfunction as evidence that it should be cut further. The same playbook applied to public schools, public transit, the postal service.

Why This Matters

The public library is not a relic. It is a working example of a principle that most of American public life has abandoned: that some things should be available to everyone regardless of ability to pay.

We don't talk about libraries this way because they're grandfathered in; they were established before the current orthodoxy that everything valuable should be marketized. If you tried to create them from scratch today, you'd face every objection that gets leveled at public investment. Why should taxpayers subsidize people who can afford to buy their own books? Isn't there a market solution? Won't people abuse the system?

But libraries already answered these objections. Taxpayers do subsidize them, and the return on investment is extraordinary. There isn't a market substitute; nothing else provides this combination of services at this scale for this cost. And yes, some people "abuse" the system in the sense that they use the library as a shelter or a bathroom. The question is whether that constitutes abuse or whether it constitutes a public institution fulfilling its most basic obligation: being public.

In an era when every shared space has been privatized, every public service has been means-tested, every common resource has been enclosed and monetized, the library is still there. Still free. Still open. Still serving whoever walks through the door.

Protect it like the radical institution it is. Because if we lose it, we're not getting it back.