I guess I need to get out more. 🫤

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Totally agree, Mike. I miss the gun store I used to hang out at in Mocksville that closed down during the Trump slump. The new store that opened in town isn’t as friendly or comfortable. No place to sit, have a cup of coffee, and chat. Maybe that is by design. They seem to be doing well financially. I write about that old store in my book in the section where I pick up my AR-15. It was a great moment.

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It’s funny, David … I was just thinking the same about small local gun shops—which, in my estimation, seem to be doing just fine despite all of the usual pressures from big box retailers. Many of our local gun stores have developed little communities of customers that congregate regularly, that show-and-tell their finds, and that become living and breathing organisms unto themselves.

I almost never go into the big box stores like Cabelas, Bass Pro, etc. I don’t begrudge their existence, but I also know that their bread-and-butter is selling standard retail catalog stuff at MSRP, and that’s not what I’m generally interested in seeing. I’d rather see the oddball stuff that wanders in—usually with a curious story behind it.

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Actually, local independent bookstores are thriving — at least for now. They have so much potential to be gathering places for communities and to contribute back to communities in ways that Amazon cannot. I just wish they were more ideologically diverse.

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Sadly, this is true. With the rise of Amazon and other online sources, the days of the independent book store are fading.

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LOL. So much easier to just shift bookstore culture back from progressivism to liberalism.

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As a psychologist in academia, my thought is that “liberals” (to use the term as currently applied) like to think they are “fluid” or open-minded. They consider their philosophy open-minded. Perhaps because the narrow positions they take are largely non-traditional, outside of the mainstream. They consider this Avant Garde nature to be “openness”.

Depending on how one collected such data – for instance, via self-report – I would imagine they would use such descriptors for themselves. Thus, they use words like “diversity” or “inclusion” while actually being exclusionary. Often, when we discuss the university “climate” I remind them that their version of inclusion excludes diverse viewpoints. They define that as “open-minded.” I suspect, if one used their behavior as a metric instead of their self-perception, we would find they are not so fluid after all. They define fluidity in largely fixed terms.

I suspect the opposite is somewhat true for conservatives. Their perspective and opinions, and their perceptions of themselves, likely appear somewhat fixed, so self-report survey data would reflect that. Yet, their behavior largely appears fluid, which probably underlies the fact that we see very little demonstrative behavior from conservatives. I have yet to see a conservative organization on our campus hold protests, block traffic and require LE intervention and CS gas to disperse.

JMHO.

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Definitely thinking about the right words to use to describe myself and those around me! I feel like my political views have been consistent over the past decades but the world around me has definitely shifted on both sides.

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So, maybe it would be more accurate to say bookstores are progressive cultural institutions. It may at least be more “evergreen” to say that; because I expect that as the progressive movement shifts deeper into (or hopefully eventually away from) extreme political views, book stores will follow.

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