Conservatives Are Losing the Culture War Over Guns
Conservatives Are Losing the Culture War Over Guns
While Republicans have successfully blocked legislative changes, Americans’ attitudes are changing.
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Who’s winning the post-Parkland debate over guns? It depends where you look.
The climate isn’t much different outside of Washington. While some bluish states are considering tightening gun control laws, red states like Kansas, Indiana and South Dakota have actually responded to Parkland by making it easier to own a gun.
But shift your lens from public policy to culture, and the last two weeks look very different. More than twenty corporations, including United Airlines, Hertz, and MetLife have cut ties with the NRA. Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods, two of America’s largest gun retailers, have both announced they will stop selling guns to people under the age of 21. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas gun control activists have become national heroes, praised by numerous celebrities. And last week, at a CNN town hall, those students and their families booed NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch so loudly so that they almost drowned her out.
This bifurcation between the governmental and cultural aftermath of Parkland has had a telling impact on conservatives. They remain powerful, yet they feel under siege. The day after the CNN town hall, Loesch spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) convention. In fifteen minutes, she barely mentioned the legislative process. Instead, she mostly discussed the ways in which journalists and corporations defame and persecute the supporters of run rights. She accused tech companies of “chang[ing] their algorithms” and “Google rankings” in order to “suppress our speech on social media platforms.” She implied that CNN had not allowed anti-gun control “junior ROTC members” to ask questions at the town hall. She repeatedly addressed the “legacy media” covering her speech, and after claiming that they “love mass shootings,” warned that they would likely “scream at me and confront me” after her talk. She claimed that had security guards not protected her at the CNN town hall, people in the audience, “who were rushing the stage, screaming burn her,” would have threatened her life. Finally, near the end of the speech, as if to explain its focus, Loesch declared, “Always remember, always … politics is downstream from culture. It’s going to happen in culture first before it happens in politics.”
Other conservatives have echoed Loesch’s persecution narrative. Discussing the corporations cutting ties to the NRA, Rod Dreher warned in The American Conservative, “Once big business joins the social justice mob, it’s over. I’m beginning to understand now what friends who grew up in communist countries mean when they tell me that the atmosphere in the West now reminds them of their youth.” Conservative journalist Bethany Mandel called the CNN town hall “a lynch mob.” A Breitbart headline warned that, “YouTube is Shutting Down Conservative Criticism of CNN over Parkland Shooting.”
It’s odd. On the subject of guns, conservatives have dominated public policy, both in Washington and in the states, for decades. Pro-NRA Republicans run Congress, most state legislatures, most gubernatorial mansions and the White House. Few gun control advocates believe they can even pass a new version of the assault weapons ban they passed in 1994. Yet by focusing on culture, not policy, conservatives over the last two weeks have told themselves that their most basic freedoms—not merely their right to own a gun, but their rights to free speech and perhaps life itself—are at risk.
Contrast that with what the last eighteen months have brought culturally: The #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and harassment. The Boy Scouts’ decision to admit girls. Football players protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem. The mass removal of Confederate statues. For every political victory, conservatives have suffered a cultural loss.
It’s the same with immigration. Republicans have channeled their fears of demographic change into a widespread embrace of restrictions on even legal immigration. (Only fifteen percent of Republicans say immigration from “predominantly Christian countries” is too high). But even if Republicans succeed in eliminating the “visa lottery” and restricting family reunification, the demographic shifts that unnerve them will likely continue. As the sociologist Ruben Rumbaut has noted, because Latinos are younger than other Americans and on average have more children, “they will account for the lion’s share of US population growth for the next several decades—regardless of what happens with immigration.”
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About the Author
- Peter Beinart is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York.
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