Merchants of the Right

Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy

By: Jennifer Carlson

Narrated by: Jennifer Cole

Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

This audiobook narrated by Jennifer Cole paints an eye-opening portrait of the gun sellers who navigated the social turmoil leading up to the January 6 Capitol attack

Gun sellers sell more than just guns. They also sell politics. Merchants of the Right sheds light on the unparalleled surge in gun purchasing during one of the most dire moments in American history, revealing how conservative political culture was galvanized amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, racial unrest, and a U.S. presidential election that rocked the foundations of American democracy.

Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews with gun sellers across the United States, Jennifer Carlson takes listeners to the front lines of the culture war over gun rights. Even though the majority of gun owners are conservative, new gun buyers are more likely to be liberal than existing gun owners. This posed a dilemma to gun sellers in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election: embrace these liberal customers as part of a new, perhaps post-partisan chapter in the American gun saga or double down on gun politics as conservative terrain. Carlson describes how gun sellers mobilized mainstays of modern conservative culture—armed individualism, conspiracism, and partisanship—as they navigated the uncertainty and chaos unfolding around them, asserting gun politics as conservative politics and reworking and even rejecting liberal democracy in the process.

Merchants of the Right offers crucial lessons about the dilemmas confronting us today, arguing that we must reckon with the everyday politics that divide us if we ever hope to restore American democracy to health.

©2023 Jennifer Carlson (P)2023 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

“A work of pure genius. Weaving together research, history, and personal narrative, Carlson tells the gripping and oft-unexpected story of gun sellers as arbiters not just of firearm economies but also of conservative values, ethics, and ideologies. Merchants of the Right will change the way we think about guns in America. Truly a must-read.”—Jonathan M. Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland

“Brilliant. Merchants of the Right offers a nuanced portrait of how guns are woven into the behaviors and identities of real people, and poses provocative questions about the relationship between violence and democracy itself. This is an essential book for anyone looking to understand the cultural and political stakes of debates over guns in the United States—now more than ever.”—Patrick Blanchfield, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

“During the crises of 2020–2021, Americans didn’t reflexively set aside their differences and turn toward each other in common cause. Instead, many millions turned against each other in fear. Carlson looks at our civic unraveling through the eyes of ground-level witnesses: America’s gun sellers. She tells a vivid, sobering story of a nation on edge, with warnings that we ignore at our peril.”—Kristin A. Goss, coauthor of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know

Deeply informative but bad reader

The content of this book was outstanding. It seems well researched, is thoughtfully presented and conveys a complex story in an understandable and enlightening way. The reader, on the other hand, seems to have serious difficulty pronouncing even common words. It’s a bit shocking from what sounds like a native English speaker. Her poor cadence, apparently unconnected to sentence structure and meaning, only adds to the irritating experience of listening to her try to read. But the author did such an outstanding job with the content, suffering through the reader was worth it.