Today, I have the opposite of a “hot take”: Bookstores are liberal cultural institutions.
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.
Gun Culture 2.0 
I think the political psychologists’ research probably has methodological problems, as other research shows that conservatives better understand liberal positions on issues than liberals do conservatives.
One possible explanation I’ve seen is that mass media has inherent biases and really only presents the actual context and content and reasoning of liberal positions, and actively dismisses or misrepresents those of conservatives. conservatives have more opportunity to understand opposing viewpoints as they actually are.
This, often admittedly intentional, lack of real representation of contrary views creates an intellectual and philosophical echo chamber or “bubble” for many of those of a liberal bent that prevents any actualization of whatever “experiential openness” might exist in theory.
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Very fair. Klein presents data showing liberal bias on issues that they care about (e.g., gun control), and this is central to Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” also.
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I disagree pretty strongly with the hypothesis that “liberals” have more fluid world views.
And as an aside: this thread is a good example of why I dislike using the term “liberal” in this context. Classic liberalism has nothing to do with the cultural and intellectual echo chambers that you’re talking about.
Mainstream leftism is becoming increasingly rigid and intolerant. To with: mainstream leftism now embraces a structural hierarchy of victimhood, an increasingly rigid definition of what “diversity” means, and a tendency towards institutional groupthink and bureaucratic frameworks (as opposed to individual rights and responsibilities). This is why, David, you’ve received such a cold reception to your book in your own community of academics: you’re rejecting the leftist institutional groupthink about guns and asking probing and open-ended questions with earnestness. And, not surprisingly, you’ve discovered enormously complex answers to those questions—ones that don’t generally support the institutional/bureaucratic solutions that so many leftists put forward.
I love a good bookstore, but I agree that they’re often single-tracked in their political orientation. I accept this as a part of going to most independent bookstores, just as I accept mainstream conservatism as the pervasive culture in most gun stores.
Openness to new experience and its counterbalancing trait, conscientiousness, are just two of the big five. A healthy dose of both is a good thing, as is the ability to rise above identity politics and to think for one’s self — especially in a world where most things live in the grey space.
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I hear you! I need to find a better term to describe where I stand. Just yesterday I was talking about living in the gray in a black and white world of gun politics. I also think it was either Jay Shetty or Rick Rubin who was saying that a black and white TV actually doesn’t display in black and white but in shades of gray. Now that I think of it, probably many others would say the same.
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I wonder how the rigidity of the mainstream left is a product of an unrestricted vision (as explicated by Thomas Sowell). It seems that the view that anyone who disagrees with them is not only wrong, but evil, is present. For myself, I try not to ascribe evil intentions to those with whom I disagree (but sometimes that is VERY hard).
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And I almost forgot – I agree that we need a new term, other than Liberal. Clearly the current “liberals” have little in common with the classical liberals of the past who favored free speech and equality of opportunity and not suppression of “hate speech” and equality of outcome.
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“…Ezra Klein observes in his book Why We’re Polarized, liberals are (supposed to be) characterized by open-mindedness.”
The radical left has never been liberal, quite the opposite. In the 1960s, the New Left (e.g. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Horowitz, Stokely Carmichael) felt contempt for liberals.
The radical left has much more influence than it used to — in the universities and in the Democratic Party. That’s why so many liberals, e.g. Dennis Prager, now identify as Republicans. They’re just as liberal now as when they were Democrats.
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if you’re ever on the coast of Northern Oregon you should visit Robert’s Bookshop in Lincoln City, OR. There is half a room of gun books including quite a few historical ones.
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Very much on my to go list (coastal Northern Oregon), so this is just another reason to make that happen!
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I think the term “liberal” is incorrectly applied to progressives; some might even say it’s been stolen. Many progressives are now hostile to classic liberal values. As that shift has happened, many book stores have moved with it.
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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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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First, I have to agree with those who have noted that the term “liberal” has been co-opted and misapplied in recent history. As I have noted in previous comments, I was a “liberal” until a couple of decades ago. It used to essentially mean “live and let live.” But when the ground shifted under my feet, I found the label conservative much more appropriate.
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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I think you should consider opening a bookstore that reflects your narrative.
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LOL. So much easier to just shift bookstore culture back from progressivism to liberalism.
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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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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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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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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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I guess I need to get out more. 🫤
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