Tuesday, February 18, 2025
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Bookstores as Liberal Cultural Institutions

by Tony Grist
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Today, I have the opposite of a “hot take”: Bookstores are liberal cultural institutions.

Sign in front of bookstore in Salisbury, NC, November 2024. Photo by David Yamane

Maybe that’s why I — as a liberal — enjoy them so much? When I am in town and have some spare time, I will visit local community gems like The Bookhouse, Book Ferret, or Bookmarks in Winston-Salem. Any time I am traveling and have some spare time, I will check out bookstores like Lamplight Books or Kinokuniya in Seattle recently. I will occasionally even take a road trip to check out bookstores like South Main Book Company in Salisbury, North Carolina.

I was particularly interested to visit South Main Book Company because I had asked them in June 2024 to consign my book, Gun Curious: A Liberal Professor’s Surprising Journey Inside America’s Gun Culture. They did not respond to my inquiry. Fair enough. There are more books published than can be carried in any bookstore, and more authors who want to consign their books than there is space.

But I was interested to see if South Main carried other books about guns and, if so, what books?

Found: American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson. I’ve reviewed the book in three different places: The Reload, the Wyoming Firearms Research Center, and on my blog/YouTube channels. TL:DR: It is interesting but also what you would expect two liberal journalists to say about the AR-15.

Found: An explicit recommendation of the 2018 book by Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. It is a thought-provoking book, no question, but also looks at gun culture from the perspective of The (liberal) Master Narrative.

Found: A recent book by historian Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance. Carrying this book is presumably acceptable because the gun-toting person on the front cover is (it seems) an historical figure, an African-American woman, and carrying a shotgun not a handgun or an AR-15. I can’t comment on the substance of the book but I am looking forward to reading it soon.

So, South Main Book Company, like bookstores generally, is a liberal cultural institution.

Of course, the recognition that bookstores are liberal cultural institutions does not mean that the books they carry must be in line with liberal cultural views.

After all, as Ezra Klein observes in his book Why We’re Polarized, liberals are (supposed to be) characterized by open-mindedness. In my keynote address to the Liberal Gun Club national meeting last October, I borrowed from Klein in observing that political psychologists find liberals more than conservatives have a basic psychological disposition they call experiential openness – tolerance for threat and uncertainty in one’s environment. That’s why we prefer Whole Foods to Cracker Barrel. That’s why we prefer forward looking hope and change to backward looking MAGA. A book called Prius or Pickup? used a psychological scale called “fixed and fluid.” Liberals have fluid over fixed worldviews.

This is why I thought — erroneously, it turns out — that liberal cultural elite gatekeepers would be among the firearms skeptics who would be open-minded enough to consider my book’s alternative to the dominant narrative about guns in America.

Although I am tragically optimistic enough to think I may ultimately be proven wrong, for now, I have to conclude that most bookstores are run by gatekeeping liberal cultured despisers of guns.

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