Review of “Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy” by Jennifer Carlson

I was asked to review Jennifer Carlson’s new book, Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2023) for the International Sociological Association’s journal, International Sociology Reviews.

I am posting the review here and now because the journal is published biennially so my review will not appear until this fall or next spring (this is a typical academic publishing timeline).

Note that there is much more I could say about the specifics of the book, but I only had 1,500 words to work with. As with all of Carlson’s work, you will see me engage these ideas in my own work in the years to come.

By David Yamane, Wake Forest University

Judging from the regular inquiries I receive from international media, a robust civilian gun culture is enigmatic outside the United States. Or at least the particular civilian gun culture of the United States is. As the interdisciplinary study of guns shows, it is enigmatic to many Americans as well.

In the growing field of gun studies, MacArthur Foundation-certified genius Jennifer Carlson holds a singular position at the top. Merchants of the Right follows her pathbreaking studies of (mostly) white men who publicly carry guns in the context of socioeconomic decline in Citizen-Protectors (Oxford, 2015) and the racial politics of gun rights through the prism of law enforcement in Policing the Second Amendment (Princeton, 2020).

This book uses the thoughts of gun retailers during the COVID-19 pandemic gun buying spree in the U.S. as a window onto the politics of guns and understands the politics of guns as a microcosm of right-leaning politics more generally.

The titular “merchants” here are 50 gun sellers in four states – Arizona, California, Florida, and Michigan – that Carlson interviewed from April to August 2020. Of these, 84% self-identified as some variety of politically conservative (including Republican, libertarian, Constitutionalist, and Christian conservative) (p. 31). Hence the book’s title: Merchants of the Right. These individuals do not only peddle guns, but a conservative political imagination that has dire consequences for democracy itself (Ch. 4). In a more normative and speculative conclusion, Carlson considers the implications of her study for the future of democracy in America.

Drawing on Swidler’s “toolkit theory,” Carlson devotes one chapter to each of three primary “civic tools” that constitute gun sellers’ political imaginations: armed individualism (Ch. 1), conspiracism (Ch. 2), and partisanship (Ch. 3).

Safety and security are universal human concerns.Carlson’s interviews with gun sellers show how this concern is interpreted through the lens of conservative politics. Armed individualism turns attention away from collective solutions to the problem of security and toward personal responsibility. Rooted in settler colonialism and chattel slavery, this “gun-centric sensibility” gets updated throughout American history (p. 37). In Citizen-Protectors, Carlson puts the most recent incarnation in the context of the rise of neoliberalism; others have used the term “responsibilization” to characterize this ethos.

As the COVID-19 pandemic amplified concerns for safety and security, many sought to alleviate those concerns by purchasing firearms. In the same way that many became “preppers” during the coronavirus pandemic – hoarding toilet paper, cleaning wipes, and hand sanitizer – gun buyers stocked their arsenals or in many cases began new ones (p. 53). As a result, Carlson’s gun sellers felt vindicated in their view of armed individualism as a mechanism of control in times of profound uncertainty (p. 68).

The self-reliance that firearms achieve through force is complimented by conspiracism as a cultural tool that supports self-reliance through knowledge (p. 73). Conspiracism is part of a broader shift among conservatives toward distrust not just of government but all elites. This was particularly apparent in how Carlson’s interviewees saw science during the coronavirus pandemic. In my own wanderings through American gun culture, I have seen this ethos as well, perhaps best reflected in a gun social media influencer who described the mask he was forced to wear to combat COVID as a “Marxist face diaper.”

The treatment of partisanship was my favorite of the three toolkit chapters because other gun scholars and I have noted the changing face of gun owners evident during the great gun-buying spree of 2020 (Yamane 2023). New gun owners include more racialized minorities, women, LGBTQ people, people living in urban and suburban areas, and political liberals. Carlson’s gun sellers often welcomed some of these new faces, but their extremely partisan conservative politics led them to draw the line at political diversity. Partisanship “provided a tool for gun sellers to police the boundaries of gun culture as conservative terrain” (p. 104). Which would be fine if the implications were limited to gun culture. But Carlson suggests that, at its worst, gun sellers’ partisanship drew a line around citizenship and political community that put their liberal political opponents on the outside.

To be clear: Carlson recognizes that Democrats are even more likely than Republicans to agree that the country would be better off if their political opponents “just died” (p. 127) and that partisanship is non-partisan (p. 129). Her empirical focus here is simply on one side of the two-way street of negative polarization.

Taken together, these three civic tools inform the political imaginations of gun sellers. Carlson identifies three: a libertarian imagination “which centers on a celebration of individual rights as the preferred remedy to social ills”; an illiberal imagination, “which rallies around an exclusionary vision of ‘the people’ to resuscitate a bygone era of American democracy”; and an eclectic imagination, “which brings together elements of conservative and liberal politics by emphasizing individual rights alongside collective responsibility” (p. 135).

The overwhelming majority of Carlson’s gun sellers reflect one of the two conservative political imaginations (libertarian and illiberal) that are at odds with liberal democracy’s need for balancing the conflicting demands of political equality, social difference, individual liberty, and the common good. Carlson finds some hope, however, in the eclectic imagination shared by the only three gun sellers who self-identified as left-of-center (p. 154). Because these gun sellers “straddled political worlds” – conservative gun culture and liberal political culture – they reflected the imagination that might develop among diverse, non-traditional, first-time gun buyers. And in the end, this suggests a path out of the crisis of democracy weighing on Carlson’s mind.

Carlson begins her concluding chapter on “The Democracy We Deserve” by adapting a line from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto: “There’s a specter haunting American democracy—the specter of the gun owner.” Her case departs from Marx’s, though, because Marx took the specter of communism to be a force for good, such that “[a]ll the powers . . . have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.” In the contemporary United States, gun owners are often seen as a destructive force, and the oppositional holy alliance includes the national Democratic Party, gun violence prevention advocacy groups, public health scholars, and generally those who construct a master narrative of democracy-destroying right-wing gun politics (e.g., Busse 2021, Lacombe 2021).

On one reading, Carlson’s book contributes to this master narrative. She argues that the 1970s merger of the National Rifle Association as a political force and the broader conservative political movement in the U.S. created a gun-centric politics that has played an essential role in the crisis of American democracy. This runs from “democratically perverse outcomes,” such as the Congress not passing universal background checks despite popular support (p. 163), to the “illiberal mobilization of democracy” in the assault on the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6^th, in which armed individualism, conspiracism, and partisanship were on full display (pp. 164-5). Gun sellers’ dominant libertarian and illiberal political imaginations are two particular responses to the challenges of living “at the edge of democracy” (Ch. 4), but ultimately they push us closer to the edge.

A second reading suggests a more nuanced view of American gun owners and gun culture. This returns me to a significant empirical carve-out Carlson notes in her introduction: “I focus on a conservative corner of American gun culture and American gun politics, but the reality is that there is a great deal of diversity among gun owners and gun rights advocates that this book does not engage nor attempt to capture” (p. 32). Adding these diverse voices to the conversation about guns, gun culture, and gun politics in America provides a way forward as Carlson hints at in Chapter 4 and fully recognizes in the book’s concluding paragraph: “those Americans who straddle political worlds may be the best, and last, hope for reinvigorating democratic culture in the United States and forging the democracy we deserve” (p. 181).

Why? Because those who straddle different worlds, like liberal gun owners, may be better able to “embrace rather than eschew” the conflict that is central to democracy (p. 171). They may be more comfortable with the three-part alternative democracy-enhancing civic toolkit that Carlson outlines. First, she endorses political equanimity – “a measured tolerance for uncertainty” inherent in democracy – over armed individualism’s “eager attempt at controlling it” (p. 173). Second, she promotes civic grace – “political compassion toward one’s fellow citizens” and acceptance of their “sincerity of political expression and legitimacy of political standing” (p. 174) – over exclusionary conspiracism’s distrust. Third, she encourages social vulnerability – recognizing the frailty we share in common as humans and the “grievances, losses, traumas, and suffering of fellow citizens” (p. 177) – over partisanship’s limited view of “the people.”

In the end, I agree with Jennifer Carlson that a robust democracy in America depends on the willingness of gun people and non-gun people across the political spectrum to embrace each other “as equal citizens and fellow humans” (p. 181).

REFERENCES

Busse, Ryan. 2021. Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America. New York: PublicAffairs.

Lacombe, Matthew J. 2021. Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Yamane, David. “Understanding and Misunderstanding American Gun Culture and Violence.” Journal of Lutheran Ethics 23, no. 2 (May 2023). https://learn.elca.org/jle/understanding-and-misunderstanding-american-gun-culture-and-violence/.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

David Yamane, Department of Sociology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109. Yamane is author most recently of “Gun Culture 2.0: The Evolution and Contours of Defensive Gun Ownership in America” (The ANNALS, 2023). His book Gun Curious: Understanding America’s Evolving Culture of Firearms is forthcoming in 2024.