Legacies of Militarism: Ascriptive Republicanism and the Origins of America’s Contemporary Gun Culture

Abstract

Abstract Scholars have associated gun culture with liberal individualism, but this is inconsistent with participants’ emphasis on political duty and obligation, the dominance of White men in this space, and the centrality of negative racial and gender priors. I argue that militarism – the valorization of firearms as a sign of good citizenship – is a constitutive part of one dimension of American identity which I call “ascriptive martial republicanism,” which combines the ideal of armed service with White male supremacy. I trace the origins of this conception of Americanism to the American Revolution and the military institutions that developed in the early republic. As a product of the 19th century military establishment, the National Rifle Association (NRA) brought this ideology into the 21st century, long after government abandoned it under pressure from the progressive movements of the 1960s. Through its political and legal advocacy, the group succeeded in making it once again part of the country’s institutional core via Supreme Court decisions. This new institutional regime represents a threat not only to the multicultural ethos but to democratic stability.