FROM THE ACTIVIST
Right-Wing Apocalypticism gains Traction
BY DANIEL HANSON
The most recent pulse of right- wing paranoia since Obama’s election has churned up some thoroughly nasty sediment in the river of mainstream political discourse. More specifically, the wave of pro-gun reaction in the wake of Sandy Hook and other mass shootings, rhetoric equating gun ownership with the maintenance of personal security against an undefined political/ economic/ what-have- you doomsday in the United States has become a major part of Right and Libertarian mainstream discourse. Two related trends have become associated with this paranoid miasma: the Prepper Movement and Survivalism.
Self-proclaimed Preppers (a diminutive or perhaps a bizarre mispronunciation of “prepare”) constitute a growing movement that emphasizes building personal security measures such as stockpiling food and weapons caches for the coming apocalypse or something.
To an increasing number of American conservatives, Dale Gribble was right all along.
The movement has already got pulled into the trash TV gold rush with the NatGeo series “Doomsday Preppers,” and received some peripheral media attention in the Sandy Hook tragedy, when it was revealed that the gunman obtained his weapons from his Prepper mother. Preppers are the most literal manifestation of the libertarian movement’s apocalypticism and cult of self-reliance, and with the exception of a few purely religious offshoots, they are committed to defending their perverse image of our republic and fighting the chaos that will follow its inevitable destruction.
One person put this apocalypticism, an idea that sits in tandem with racism behind the anti-tax , anti-gun, and myriad populist anti-government impulses, into a creed:
I will prepare myself and my family, mentally, financially and physically to the best of our abilities to survive small or large natural and man-made disasters. As best as possible I will integrate preparing into our daily lifestyle and seek to comply as best as possible with all existing laws.
To read the whole document is to see a very large emphasis, common among prepper rhetoric, put on self-reliance and personal law enforcement, (“If people plunder and pillage, I will do all in my power to eliminate them as a threat to me and my family”) the primary value of one’s family, and an emphasis on “moral codes.” Libertarian Survivalist and owner of a 1984 fantasy ranch Clint Smith put the Prepper Movement in more concise terms- “You cannot save the planet. You may be able to save yourself and your family.” It perhaps goes without saying that individual right to bear arms and deep mistrust of the federal government and “outsiders” is a major component of this apocalypticism. The fetishizing of the nuclear family takes the paleo-conservatism of Focus on the Family-style groups into an apocalyptic and individualist framework. The movement has a strong web presence, featuring tips on how to carry a concealed gun while running, the suggestion that coffee beans will be a competing Fiat currency post-economic implosion, and, perhaps anticipating a slightly less extreme Mad Max world, advertisements for hoarding gold and silver.
Survivalism is much broader and less malignant. It’s a hobby of declaring oneself ruggedly individualistic enough to survive in the woods, off the grid, etc. Survivalism is the province of megamarathons, naturalist gardening techniques, and homespun survivalist outdoors gears retailers. Is any of this particularly offensive in its own right? Of course not. But as some retailers and web communities show, survivalism is growing into the prepper movement’s more legitimized public face.
Liza Featherstone once noted that the popularity of camoflage patterns in clothing shows how much the militarism present in our culture has crept quite explicitly into our consumer economy. Gear that is labeled proudly as “survivalist” follows this same path, but rather it shows the nudging influence of apocalypticism and terror of our society.
For example, Survival Straps, a line of hiking bracelets that unfold into a nylon cord, has launched a pretty noticeable Facebook ad featuring pictures of the product and a dogtag with the Gadsden Flag, with the caption, “Survival Straps Second Amendment gear. 10% of proceeds go to the NRA.” It seems some other ostensibly mainstream hiking gear outlets have taken on an explicit survivalist/prepper stance, selling supplements designed to counteract the effects of radiation poisoning alongside Boy Scout standbys such as non-perishable foods. Prepper and Survivalist culture are deeply individualistic manifestations of the terror that many feel in a society that frightens them, rather than constructive critiques of the way it works. Likewise, Social Democracy is the bane of individuals who believe to the point of militancy that absolute self-reliance is the only tolerable way to defend their rights and wellbeing, and challenges to this will be met with force.
These projects prepare, largely, for the totalitarian dystopia that our country is apparently becoming. In the process, they define a movement of people who believe that their role in society is to enforce the norm and combat lawlessness. Instead of recognizing certain existent strains of social disorder in our late-capitalist society and offering alternatives, this impulse of the libertarian movement excitedly embraces an imagined dystopia as the only context in which the individual can define himself in the world, where the language of cooperation and consent is replaced with those of force and paranoia.
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