Merchants of the Right
Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
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Narrated by:
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Jennifer Cole
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By:
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Jennifer Carlson
About this listen
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 PressListeners also enjoyed...
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Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription.
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Incisive and Illuminating
- By Jakob on 01-26-23
By: Yuval Levin
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Identity
- The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
- By: Francis Fukuyama
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people”, who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.
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Robotic narrator
- By Shahin on 09-19-18
By: Francis Fukuyama
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Democracy Matters
- Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
- By: Cornel West
- Narrated by: Cornel West
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Democracy Matters is Cornel West's bold and powerful critique of the troubling deterioration of democracy in America in this threatening post-9/11 age of terrorist rage and imperial overreach, and an inspiring call for a resurgence of the deep democratic tradition in our country, which has waged war on the forces of imperialist corruption throughout our history.
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Well written, a refreshing voice of inspiration
- By Gabriel on 07-06-05
By: Cornel West
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Blackout
- How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation
- By: Candace Owens, Larry Elder
- Narrated by: Candace Owens, Larry Elder
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Black Americans have long been shackled to the Democrats. Seeing no viable alternative, they have watched liberal politicians take the Black vote for granted without pledging anything in return. In Blackout, Owens argues that this automatic allegiance is both illogical and unearned. She contends that the Democrat Party has a long history of racism and exposes the ideals that hinder the Black community’s ability to rise above poverty, live independent and successful lives, and be an active part of the American dream.
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Thought provoking!
- By Girl with curls on 09-16-20
By: Candace Owens, and others
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The Light That Failed
- Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy
- By: Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there but also back in the heartland of the West. In this brilliant work of political history, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of Communism turned out to be only the beginning of the age of the autocrat.
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Great text
- By Safronov on 05-03-21
By: Ivan Krastev, and others
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Stop Mass Hysteria
- America's Insanity from the Salem Witch Trials to the Trump Witch Hunt
- By: Michael Savage
- Narrated by: Barry Baer
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In his new audiobook, Stop Mass Hysteria, number one New York Times best-selling author Michael Savage calls out the mass hysteria mongers and their methods and shows Americans that we must look to history to understand the present and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
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Common sense in a country that is trying not to
- By Mike on 10-09-18
By: Michael Savage
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The People vs. Democracy
- Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
- By: Yascha Mounk
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The world is in turmoil. From India to Turkey and from Poland to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result democracy itself may now be at risk. Two core components of liberal democracy - individual rights and the popular will - are at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of "rights without democracy" took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create a system of "democracy without rights."
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Not worth it
- By DailyShopper on 06-07-18
By: Yascha Mounk
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What Truth Sounds Like
- Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America
- By: Michael Eric Dyson
- Narrated by: Michael Eric Dyson
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy - of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape.
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Riffing on a meeting with RFK and James Baldwin
- By Adam Shields on 06-08-18
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Hate in the Homeland
- The New Global Far Right
- By: Cynthia Miller-Idriss
- Narrated by: Kelly Burke
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements. Hate in the Homeland shows how tomorrow's far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from college campuses and mixed martial arts gyms to clothing stores, online gaming chat rooms, and YouTube cooking channels.
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Insightful solutions to combat our current times
- By Jacqueline Castillo on 07-17-22
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Trumpocalypse
- Restoring American Democracy
- By: David Frum
- Narrated by: David Frum
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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A huge swath of Americans have put their faith in Trump, and Trump only, because they see the rest of the country building a future that doesn't have a place for them. If they would risk their lives for Trump in a pandemic, they will certainly risk the stability of American democracy. They brought the Trumpocalypse upon the country, and a post-Trumpocalypse country will have to find a way either to reconcile them to democracy - or to protect democracy from them.
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Trump More Dangerous Than the Axis of Evil
- By J.B. on 05-26-20
By: David Frum
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The Long Southern Strategy
- How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics
- By: Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The Southern Strategy is traditionally understood as a Goldwater and Nixon-era effort by the Republican Party to win over disaffected white voters in the Democratic stronghold of the American South. To realign these voters with the GOP, the party abandoned its past support for civil rights and used racially coded language to capitalize on southern white racial angst. However, that decision was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the "Long Southern Strategy."
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Thorough account how GOP became what it is today
- By Dwayne on 03-28-20
By: Angie Maxwell, and others
What listeners say about Merchants of the Right
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anthony Morielli
- 05-20-23
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.
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