Would liberals really care if some books just vanished?

From the idealistic liberalism of my high school English teachers, I learned that to try to get rid of offensive literature is the great sin of easily triggered rubes.

This past week I learned from a different kind of liberalism that only easily triggered rubes care when offensive books are made to disappear. It was mildly creepy to hear that the custodians of Theodor Geisel’s estate, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, consulted with a “panel of experts” and decided to cease publishing six Seuss titles because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” But it was much creepier that so few people in the free-expression business, so few liberal journalists and critics, seemed troubled by the move.

Often the Seuss cancellation was dismissed as a boob bait for Fox News viewers and a move to which only someone sunk in white anxiety could possibly object.

Plus, we were told, it’s only six books. And is

Seuss so great anyway?

In The Guardian, Lili Wilkinson noted dismissively that “the six books in question were far from being bestsellers,” while usually perspicacious critic Alyssa Rosenberg, used the cancellation to complain about “the tiresome lack of imagination” of people who obsess over Seuss but not Peter Spier.

Now I love Spier, but this is still a censor’s argument. Upset that you can’t get a copy of Ulysses? You can still read Dubliners, which is better anyway.

The Seuss cancellations illustrate exactly the problems with censoriousness that liberals normally invoke. First, you have a nonspecific justification attributed to unnamed “experts” and “educators” that sweeps up a range of books and illustrations.

Second, the vagueness of the new standard offers openings for further disappearances. The anti-racist left is ready with a critique of Seuss’ larger oeuvre. And the principle established by this auto-cancellation could have applications well beyond Seuss.

For perfectly consistent reasons, too. Western children’s literature really has been influenced by imperialism and racism. The Babar books have obvious colonialist undertones. And as kids get older — well, “The Lord of the Rings” is waiting, with its Greco-Roman Gondorians besieged by darker races from the south and east.

I am not being dismissive here: J.R.R. Tolkien’s chauvinism is a real moral and artistic flaw. But it’s a flaw in a work of genius. In a free society that appreciates greatness, these flaws are good reasons to develop a diverse canon — but terrible reasons to make the works of important artists disappear.

The Seuss cancellations also illustrate how a disappearance can happen without a legal “ban” being literally imposed. One day, the Seuss estate decides to self-censor; the next, that decision becomes the justification for eBay to delist used copies of the books. In a cultural landscape dominated by a few big companies with politically uniform management, you don’t need state censorship for books to vanish.

Amazon, the power that controls half of U.S. new book sales and around 80% of the e-book market, is still selling the used Seuss. But maybe not forever.

It was a good thing when liberalism, as a dominant cultural force in a diverse society, included a strong tendency to police even itself for censoriousness — the don’t-ban-Mark-Twain tendency. Now liberal cultural power has increased, the ACLU doesn’t seem very interested in the liberties of nonprogressives anymore, and Dr. Seuss sells as pricey samizdat.

I don’t know what awaits beyond this particular Zebra, and I’d rather not find out.

Ross Douthat writes for The New York Times.