You Can’t Fight Fascism While Defunding Libraries
“Libraries embody everything that we need right now to fight back against fascism," says Sara Heymann.
We are living through a coordinated assault on knowledge. In a moment when Big Tech is waging war on complex thought, a fascist government is targeting higher education, and the media landscape is being demolished by the same oligarchs driving this era of smash-and-grab politics, libraries are under-appreciated outposts of struggle, sharing and survival. They are sites of refuge, where curiosity is nurtured, where people find shelter, education, entertainment, job assistance, skill-building programs, and access to resources that would otherwise be out of reach. “We do it all at the library,” Sara Heymann, a library associate in the Chicago Public Library (CPL) system, recently told me. “We do a lot of arts, science, and literacy programming. We host movie nights. We have programs for helping people with their taxes, small businesses, and mental health. We help people.”
As models of the kind of community care, education, and learning infrastructure we need not only to fight fascism but to build the world we want, public libraries should be fortified and expanded. Instead, they are often targeted during budget battles — and that is precisely what’s happening in Chicago right now. The proposed budget put forward by Mayor Brandon Johnson includes catastrophic cuts to an already underfunded library system.
These cuts must be vigorously opposed.
What Chicago’s Libraries Look Like on the Ground
To understand what such cuts would mean in practice, I spoke with Heymann, who has worked as a library associate in the teen department since 2019, and currently works at the Chicago Public Library’s Little Village branch. She described a system that has not been adequately staffed for years.
In more than six years, Heymann has rarely seen what a “fully staffed” branch looks like. When branches are fully staffed, she explained, workers can collaborate with community partners, including teachers, plan outreach and develop programming, help people using library computers, host events, and work with patrons to address their needs — the kind of work that makes a branch a true community hub.
But that version of library work has been severely compromised.
“Right now, when we're so short-staffed, a lot of times there's only three of us that are at the branch on a given day,” she said. “We are stuck at the circulation desk all day, not able to help people the way we would like to. We're not able to go in depth with programming.” Heymann says workers are “frazzled” and “unable to do outreach at all.” Under austere conditions, workers are forced to focus on “core services” in order to keep libraries running. “We're able to turn the lights on and open the doors, but we're not able to concentrate on our efforts to respond to community needs.”
Across the city, chronic vacancies have collapsed departments, forced librarians, associates, clerks, and pages to do each other’s jobs, and made even minimal program preparation nearly impossible.
This is what austerity looks like from the inside: the shell of an institution preserved, while the living parts are stripped away.
Understaffing has also made library work more dangerous. As Heymann explained, libraries absorb the stressors of a city where many people lack food, housing, mental-health care, and other basic supports. When a branch is operating with skeleton staffing, workers are often alone at a desk during escalating or threatening encounters.
“There have been times when people have come in and made violent threats against us, and there was only one of us at the desk at the time in the whole library,” she said. “You can't run away to go make a call, you don't have backup sometimes. You don't have time after an incident to step away to collect yourself,” she explained. “It makes you feel unsafe coming to work.”
Heymann described shootings outside branches, including an incident where a seriously injured person was brought inside the library for care and rescue. After such incidents, staff are expected to return to work the next day without support or time to recover.
“You just feel unsupported and just like you're a number,” she said. “You're just a body to fill a void and not an essential part of the city.”
Cutting staff any further would compound these dangers.
Cuts on Top of Cuts
The proposed 2026 budget would gut staffing even further, eliminating dozens more positions, including librarians, pages, and clerks, on top of the 50 CPL positions already cut in the 2025 budget, according to AFSCME Local 1215. Union members say the 2026 proposal would slash roughly 89 additional positions.
“If you count all the cuts from last year, 78 positions and the 89 positions from this year, that's equivalent to at least two people per library,” Heymann noted. “And I don't understand why a progressive mayor is cutting our staff to these levels when he wants us to do all these programs.”
These cuts come after more than a decade of attrition, and they strike at a system already operating below capacity. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration slashed staffing by more than 26% in 2012, and the Lightfoot administration promised in writing to restore Sunday hours by hiring 115 part-time and 62 full-time employees — a commitment library workers say was never fulfilled. Branches on the South and West Sides, which serve predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods, have consistently borne the brunt of these shortfalls, with some going years without essential positions.
The 2026 proposal would also pave the way for restructuring library positions in ways that erase long-standing specializations, such as children’s, teen, or adult librarians — forcing workers who have developed deep expertise with specific populations to instead cover any desk, in any section, at any time. At Harold Washington Library, Heymann said, this shift has already begun: decades-long specialists are now assigned to collections they don’t know.
“They're just there to be a body at the desk,” she explained.
The budget also slashes CPL’s collections budget — for books, e-resources, audiobooks, magazines, and more — from $10 million to $5 million. Anyone who checks out e-books or audiobooks already knows that waitlists can stretch for months. Cutting collections in half would make access far worse.
“Chicago is on the very bottom of the barrel levels for what we should have in terms of resources,” Heymann said, noting that CPL already spends far less per capita than Los Angeles or New York. With a 50% cut, many branches would only be able to purchase high-demand “blockbuster” titles, while specialized materials, books in languages other than English, and culturally specific collections would disappear.
And because branches could lose much of their discretionary purchasing power, communities like Little Village — where Heymann has worked hard to expand Spanish fiction and Spanish manga at the request of teen patrons — would suffer disproportionate losses.
Heymann noted that the administration initially told staff the $10 million collections budget had been restored, but later walked that back, saying the money was now “in jeopardy” because the broader budget had been voted down. As of early December, she said, staff “really don’t know” whether the collections funding will be reinstated.
All of this comes at a moment when the demand for trusted information has never been greater. “At a time when having access to information and news is pretty much as critical as I've ever seen it, people need to have an understanding of what the facts are versus what they just see online,” Heymann said.
Halving the collections budget during a disinformation crisis is not merely shortsighted. It is an assault on Chicago’s public imagination and intellectual potential.
Cuts to staffing and collections will also gut programming. Many programs — children’s story times, quilting workshops, book clubs, teen internships — require significant off-desk preparation, which staff simply cannot do while tied to the circulation desk all day. “We probably would still be able to have outside partners come in, but we have a very limited budget when it comes to things like that,” Heymann said. Even low-prep programs, like movie screenings, can become unmanageable when a single staff member is tasked with running the event and manning the circulation desk.
Security staffing, she added, has also been cut in half.
Libraries as Social Infrastructure
Libraries serve as informal social-services hubs, especially in overpoliced, under-resourced neighborhoods. People come in seeking help with housing forms, job applications, property tax spikes, immigration information, or simply a safe place to be. They are also vital physical infrastructure. In a city with extreme weather, worsening climate impacts, and few genuinely public indoor spaces, libraries keep people alive. They offer cooling in brutal heat, warmth in winter, access to water and restrooms in a city that has aggressively eliminated them, and safe “third spaces” at a time when almost every other communal space has been privatized.
“We are there day in and day out with our patrons and our regulars who are going through a myriad of things,” Heymann said. “We help them find housing if we can. We respond to the needs of the community and I don't think there's any other place that's really like the library in that way.”
Libraries represent the kind of infrastructure progressive leaders should fortify and defend at all costs, especially in this moment. Instead, libraries in Chicago are being hollowed out, while the police budget remains sacrosanct.
“The mayor and the City Council should prioritize the library budget the way they’ve prioritized the police budget,” Heymann told me. “We need to stop putting those dollars into punishment and the police and start putting them into things that are more life affirming, like our libraries.”
Heymann pointed out that the proposed city budget has earmarked $5 million for a gunshot-detection system to replace ShotSpotter — more than it would cost to maintain 2025 staffing levels at CPL. Meanwhile, city data has shown a steep drop in shootings where ShotSpotter microphones were removed, bolstering the position of organizers who have long argued that faulty and unreliable gunshot detection systems do not make our communities safer. Instead, activists who successfully campaigned to end the ShotSpotter contract have argued, gunshot detection systems merely generate dangerous police deployments, where cops show up primed to fire, on the basis of highly questionable data, creating life and death stakes for the racially profiled residents they encounter.
While Chicago is considering cuts that would hollow out its library system, New York City may be moving in the opposite direction. Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani has pledged not only to increase public library funding but to stabilize it at no less than 0.5% of the city budget, recognizing libraries as essential infrastructure for community well-being and democratic resilience. Johnson should take a cue from his fellow progressive mayor, who was likewise propelled into office by movements — including activists who believed in his promise to end the ShotSpotter contract. Johnson has fulfilled that commitment, but setting aside money for a ShotSpotter replacement while proposing devastating cuts to libraries represents a major misstep, and one he still has time to correct. Johnson should be a champion for our libraries, not a progressive mayor who strips down what remains of the commons in our city.
A choice between bankrolling debunked, deadly technology and funding Chicago’s library system should be an easy call for any responsible public official. “What is your priority for the city of Chicago?” Heymann asked.
What Chicago Could Lose
If these cuts move forward, Heymann sees a bleak trajectory: as programming diminishes and books become harder to acquire, fewer people will use library services, and that drop in participation will be used to justify further cuts. “I see it being used as a justification for more and more and more cuts. Branches will be closed,” she said. “Libraries could become spaces where we turn on the lights and open the doors and are stuck behind the desk all day. It’ll just be a warming and a cooling center essentially, which is still important, but it's not what we deserve.”
As an authoritarian administration works to consolidate power, and Big Tech wages a society-wide assault on critical thought, Heymann argues that gutting libraries is self-destructive for anyone who opposes these fascistic forces. “Libraries embody everything that we need right now to fight back against fascism. It is the medicine we need to oppose some of the most terrible things in this world.”
Heymann was clear about what’s needed now: pressure.
“People need to start just walking into their alderpeople's offices and letting them know this is something that's important to them,” she said. Calling and writing matter, but physical presence matters too.
Union organizers are calling on Chicagoans to join library workers at the December 8 Finance Committee meeting at City Hall, with supporters gathering at 9 a.m. to demand full funding for CPL and to push back against the proposed cuts. Residents can also speak at council meetings throughout the year and attend ward nights to remind elected officials that libraries are essential infrastructure.
“At the end of the day, people need to make noise,” Heymann said. “Otherwise, libraries are just going to continue being cut, because they aren’t being viewed as essential.”
But libraries are essential — to learning, to community, to democracy, and to any hope we have of building a society organized around education and collective care, rather than control. Chicago must choose to invest in what sustains us, instead of prioritizing tools of repression. The fight for our libraries is a fight for the future of public life in Chicago, and in every city.
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