Merchants of the Right by Jennifer Carlson;

Author:Jennifer Carlson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Illiberal Imagination

Nearly every answer that Eli, a white gun seller in Arizona, gave to my questions exuded a profound pessimism about American life—and the threat that Democrats posed to it. Did he consider coronavirus a pandemic? “No. I do not.” Then where did the virus come from? “I think it was made in a lab in China. They did have Dr. Fauci and former President Obama funding it.” But for what end? “I think it is a political ploy. The economy was doing great, and come time for the end of the election [cycle], they [the Democrat establishment] can’t have that. That would make our current commander-in-chief [then-President Trump] look good. And possibly get re-elected.” What was the ultimate goal of this ploy, then? The “ploy,” as he saw it, would start with Biden’s apparent nomination, but “come time for elections, he’s going to fall ill and won’t be able to run.” We were talking in the summer of 2020, months before the November electoral defeat of Trump by Biden. Sarcastically admitting that he had a “funny feeling” someone else would step in, he wagered that Michelle Obama would run: “then she will appoint Barack under her.” The hidden agenda of 2020, as Eli saw it, was to effectively reinstall Obama as president-cum-tyrant—a feat that would contradict constitutional term limits and spite the ethos of electoral democracy. Two election cycles after Obama vacated the office of the US presidency, this fear continues to reverberate: in anticipation of the 2020 election, an Ammoland article subtly evoked recent elections past by noting, “it appears now we’re at another election battle for the soul of our country.”33 Obama represented an existential threat for conservatives like Eli—a stance that sociologists Adia Harvey Wingfield and Joe Feagin34 have attributed to a “hard racial framing” rooted in fears and anxieties about the waning power of whites in America. But in Eli’s mind, his fears were fundamentally about the erosion of democracy, which justified, from his perspective, his fixation on the Obamas and liberals more generally.

From the presidential power grabs he believed were unfolding before his very eyes to the lockdown orders he observed across the country, Eli was indignant about the loss of freedoms, of rights, and ultimately, of America itself: “last I knew, this was still America. We had all the freedoms that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have given us. And they’re just being squashed.” Eli saw the chaos of 2020 as just the latest in a long line of machinations among power-hungry Democrats, and he felt that “it shouldn’t take much more for the general public to wake up and see it.” But unlike Peter, Andrew, and Ben, he wasn’t so hopeful about people waking up. As he saw it, “They’ve always—most of them have depended on the government. And they’re all for the bigger government.” Exuding cynicism about his fellow citizens, he bemoaned, “we are slipping closer and closer into socialism. And the next step is going to be communism.

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