In fact, you couldn’t even properly call it crypto-fascism: it was really just good old-fashioned original-style fascism. It didn’t seem necessary either to do a lot of racial decoding when it came to all the talk of “urban” versus “rural” America, of “city-style” gangs versus homeowner association posses. The whole appeal of the apocalypse, for this J. J. Johnson, seemed to be that it gave him a pretext for this kind of Klan-style fantasy.
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The idea of collapse speaks, on some primal level, to a reactionary sensibility—a sensibility in which the world is always necessarily in an advanced state of degeneration, having fallen from a prelapsarian wholeness and integrity. (Feminism, political correctness, the supine attitude of the left toward Islam, and so on: the structure of Western civilization is, in the reactionary view, always being eaten away from within.)
Prepping is rooted in the apprehension of an all-consuming decadence. Society has become weak, excessively reliant on systems of distribution and control whose very vastness and complexity renders them hopelessly vulnerable. The city is the source of this decadence. Preppers don’t trust cities, or those who make their lives in them. All those people living at a remove from the production of food, completely reliant on those vast and fragile systems, of distribution and waste collection, those heaving masses of humanity, incorrigibly plural and various. And what this suspicion amounts to is a suspicion of modernity itself.
Take the show Doomsday Preppers, which aired on the National Geographic Channel from 2011 to 2014. On the surface level, this was a reality television program about American men making elaborate preparations for the collapse of civilization: building fortresses, bunkers, remote rural hideouts; stockpiling weapons, tools, foodstuffs, and other postapocalyptic essentials. But you don’t have to sit through very many episodes on YouTube to understand the extent to which the show is in fact a reality TV psychodrama about masculinity in crisis.
The protagonists of the show, typically middle-class rural white men—not especially wealthy or highly educated, but comfortable enough to invest significant proportions of their income on fantasies of rugged self-sufficiency in the wake of a great civilizational crackup—are uniformly obsessed with purifying their lives of dependence on others. These men’s critique of modernity, such as it is, is a critique of the extent to which the individual has become weakened and compromised by such dependency. “I was raised to not rely on anybody,” as one prepper puts it, in a more or less representative statement of the movement’s politics. “Don’t rely on your government, don’t rely on your neighbors. You count on yourself first.”
The show is grindingly repetitive—once you’ve seen one middle-aged American white guy pursue his elaborate fantasy of individualism and self-sufficiency, you’ve pretty much seen them all—but there is a bleak comedy to the spectacle of these men performing, and imposing on those around them, their understanding of what it means to live in the “real world.” They are, almost to a man, deeply invested in the notion of their own pragmatic approach to life, and to the future. These preppers are often surrounded by people—usually women—who are less driven by the desire for independence, less maniacally certain about the advent of apocalypse, and who must therefore be taken in hand, initiated into the ways of the prepper.
In one episode, we meet Brian Murdock, a Massachusetts real estate broker and devout Christian. Brian is the consummate prepper, in the sense that every aspect of his life appears to be subservient to the overall project of readying himself for the collapse of civilization. (The particular scenario in Brian’s case is a third world war, arising out of a nuclear attack by the United States on Iran, avenged by a counterattack on Israel. “I know this with every fiber of my being,” he says, leaning against the wooden porch of his colonial home, lemon polo shirt tucked into the waistband of his checked board shorts. “One-third of the earth will perish.”) His decision to marry, he says, was taken after learning that the chances of surviving a catastrophic event greatly increase when you have a partner who is invested in your survival.
And so, in an apparent effort to reverse engineer a normal human relationship from the premise of his own self-interested survivalism, he joins a dating website and meets a young woman from Colombia named Tatiana. Having made a couple of trips down there to get to know her, he arranges for her to come to America as his fiancée. He is particularly drawn to Colombia as a wife-sourcing location because he has heard that their way of life is very simple, and that they have a culture of “gratitude” and “respect.” Brian doesn’t mention feminism, but it seems implicit, as we watch his intended young bride loading the dishwasher after her first meal in America, that traditional gender roles are an important part of his vision for postapocalyptic survival.
“I believe that the blessing of marriage,” he says, “the covenant of marriage, is very central to prepping.”
Having arrived in the United States, Tatiana is taken aback to be told about Brian’s nuclear war plan to retreat to a fifty-acre property seven hours’ drive away. Before she is even allowed to unpack her suitcase, she is made to prepare a bug-out bag. None of this—prepping, bugging out, nuclear contingency plans—had come up in their conversations before she’d come to America, and it all seems strange and confusing to her. “When Brian told me he was a prepper,” she says, “I thought he was crazy. In Colombia we don’t do it. We don’t know about saving food for bad times, you know, because there are bad times all the time already.” But her husband is wise, she says, and she is committed to one day becoming the perfect prepper wife.
The show overwhelmingly presents women as naive and in need of tutoring in the ways of prepping. Wives are skeptical, concerned with the frivolities of everyday life, but invariably come round in the end to the necessity of regular drills, firearm training, and so forth. Daughters are taught to fear “marauders,” hungry men with rage in their hearts and lust in their eyes. The family becomes a kind of fortress against the dangers of the world, the father a figure of feudal paternalism, offering protection through the skillful dispensing of violence, masculine know-how, and ingenuity. There is a fetishizing of older ways of being a family, of how things were imagined to be before the advent of feminism and other corrosive social forces.
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Preppers are not preparing for their fears: they are preparing for their fantasies. The collapse of civilization means a return to modes of masculinity our culture no longer has much use for, to a world in which a man who can build a toilet from scratch—or protect his wife and children from intruders using a crossbow, or field dress a deer—is quickly promoted to a new elite. The apocalypse, whatever form it takes, will mean misery and death for most human beings, but for the prepared, it will mean a return to first principles, to a world in which men are men. Especially if they are white.