Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States

Doomsday prepping has gone mainstream. Survivalists star in reality TV shows; celebrities hawk emergency gear; and ordinary people stockpile essentials in the hope that they can outlast a slew of threats, real and imagined. The ideology behind prepping, however, is no passing fad but a persistent feature of American life. Be Prepared reveals the surprising ways prepping is woven into the fabric of American institutions―and shows its significance for understanding the fault lines of liberal democracy.

Robert E. Kirsch and Emily Ray trace the beliefs and practices that underlie survivalism, from the rise of the Boy Scouts of America to Cold War fears of nuclear devastation through present-day Silicon Valley dreams of space colonization. They argue that prepping is rooted in long-standing anxieties over industrialization, urbanization, and immigration and steeped in the histories of colonial expansion and militarization. To grasp its political implications, Kirsch and Ray develop the concept of “bunkerization”: not simply building physical bunkers but building a society symbolized by the bunker. In such a society, individual vigilance and survival become the organizing principles of everyday life. People opt out of collective projects and retreat into personal responsibility for preparedness, expressed through acts of consumption. Shedding new light on the persistence of antidemocratic politics, from white supremacy to neoliberalism, Be Prepared also considers how to escape the solitary fate of life in the bunker and instead meet collective problems together.

Robert E. Kirsch is an assistant professor in the School of Applied Professional Studies at Arizona State University.

Emily Ray is an associate professor of political science at Sonoma State University.