Mad Men

Amidst the competing stories of financial misdeeds, one thing that’s become clear is that Ackerman McQueen has long been an underappreciated force within the NRA. As the New Yorker’s Mike Spies wrote:

Even as the association has reduced spending on its avowed core mission—gun education, safety, and training—to less than ten percent of its total budget, it has substantially increased its spending on messaging. The N.R.A. is now mainly a media company, promoting a lifestyle built around loving guns and hating anyone who might take them away.

There’s a fascinating sociological aspect to the story of how the NRA was transformed into a beacon of insurrectionary red-state culture warriors not by true believers from the gun-loving base, but by twenty-first-century Don Drapers. One longtime NRA employee described the Ackerman employees to Spies as highly skilled mercenaries who “weren’t your folks who were interested in Second Amendment politics” but instead were “your typical New York or Austin types that are excited about doing really big projects and creative projects.”

But the political lesson is that if the NRA is largely a spin factory, its highly touted ability to swing elections and shape the culture deserves closer scrutiny.

In 2012, Paul Waldman conducted a study of the NRA’s influence over the previous four national elections. He found that the NRA’s success rate in House races was mostly a result of the group endorsing incumbent Republicans in uncompetitive races. In competitive Senate races in which the NRA poured significant resources, the group had a Mets-like won-loss record of 10–12.

To be sure, national elections don’t cover the full extent of the NRA’s influence. As Benjamin McKean pointed out in Jacobin last year, the organization’s real strength lies in its base of five million dues payers, who make up both a mass audience and a pool of grassroots leaders to inject the organization’s toxic brew of libertarianism and racial paranoia into the political mainstream. But how much do rank-and-file NRA members, most of whom join the organization for its services like firearms training and insurance, agree with or even pay attention to the group’s propaganda?

In his reporting on the NRA-Ackerman standoff, Danny Hakim of the New York Times found that NRATV — Ackerman’s “signature product” — had fewer than fifty thousand unique visitors in January 2019. That’s a stunningly miniscule number given Ackerman’s $40 million annual budget. It’s also wildly out of line with the national attention NRATV understandably receives for its outrageous content.

Another Thing to Blame on Clinton

None of this is to say that the NRA is a paper tiger. If anything, some of its current financial problems result from its success: it’s hard to fundraise on paranoia that the government is coming for your guns as the first step in a globalist liberal conspiracy to take away all your rights when the guy running that government seems to believe all your conspiracy theories.

But it does show that, like Trump himself, the NRA represents a hard-right minority that has benefited enormously from the weak opposition it has faced from the centrist-dominated Democratic Party. It’s those very centrists, in fact, who have found it useful to exaggerate the NRA’s strength rather than face up to their own weakness.

The myth of the unbeatable gun lobby started in the aftermath of the 1994 Republican landslide in the midterm elections, which then-president Bill Clinton attributed to his party being punished for passing the Assault Weapons Ban. This explanation conveniently ignored the demoralization on the Left produced by the Democrats’ miserable performance after two years of controlling the White House and both houses of Congress. (Universal health care? No. NAFTA? Yes.) It also cast Clinton and his team as being punished for doing the right thing, which both gratified their egos and laid the groundwork for arguing that the party needed to move still further to the right (Gutting welfare? Mass incarceration? Financial deregulation? Yes! Yes! Yes!) in order to win elections in a country that was clearly teeming with right-wing, gun-loving rubes.

The NRA has been a useful boogeyman ever since for “third-way” Democrats like Clinton and Al Gore looking to make the party fully competitive with Republicans for the allegiance of capitalist donors. Stories of the fearsome gun lobby returned after Gore, an unbelievably soulless candidate — whose campaign slogan was “prosperity and progress” — lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush.

Here’s Bill Clinton’s tortured explanation of why Gore lost the key state of Colorado:

… a referendum designed to close the so-called gun show loophole shared the ballot with the presidential ticket. Gore publicly backed the proposal, while Bush opposed it. Though the referendum passed with 70 percent of the vote, Gore lost the state. Clinton said that the reason was because a good chunk of the referendum’s opponents were single-issue voters who automatically rejected Gore as anti-gun.

How is it mathematically possible to be hurt by backing a measure with 70 percent support? The logic is tortured but the motivation is straightforward: centrist Democrats are forever looking for excuses to explain why something always seems to get in the way of their delivering on the progressive agenda that their voters want. As the pace of mass shootings has accelerated in the twenty-first century, the NRA has also become a conveniently Republican scapegoat that allows Democrats to ignore their own continued support for permanent war, police militarization, economic insecurity and hopelessness, and other policies that are clearly related to our national gun sickness.

What clever centrist strategists never seemed to realize is that the dual tack of hyping the NRA’s power as a destructive right-wing force and then citing their power as a reason to be moderate only made these moderates appear to be even more cowardly and unprincipled.

Last spring’s wave of school walkouts against gun violence that followed the Parkland massacre — in which students boldly challenged not only the NRA’s outsize political influence but also institutional racism, police profiling, and youth unemployment — showed that people are running out of patience with these failures. A successful political and cultural movement to reduce gun violence will need to recognize the NRA as a serious threat while understanding the reports of its omnipotence have been greatly exaggerated. We can thank Wayne LaPierre and Oliver North for pointing that out to us.