50 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020from something disaster scientists
call “elite panic,” when people in
positions of power fear the loss of
their power and so overreact in vio-
lent ways. Solnit quotes the sociolo-
gist Kathleen Tierney’s description
of the phenomenon:fear of social disorder; fear of poor,
minorities and immigrants; obsession
with looting and property crime; will-
ingness to resort to deadly force; and
actions taken on the basis of rumor.Elite panic on behalf of white con-
servatives led to a vast increase in
prepping during Barack Obama’s pres-
idency; there was a downtick in inter-
est after Donald Trump entered the
White House—ironic, given the
comparative risks of a catastrophic
event then and now. Trump has
made the Environmental Protection
Agency into an auctioneer of public
lands, which has in turn rapidly un-
done commonsense regulation. Not
to mention that with his deregulation
and outright looting of the environ-
ment in the interest of privatizing
public wealth, he has pushed the
Doomsday Clock much closer to mid-
night. But survivalism, as it exists
now in America, is not rational. It is
emotional. It is the twisting of hyper-
masculine fear into a semblance of
preparedness and rationality.
I lay in my hotel bed in Green-
ville, finally clean, and began to feel
a strange and terrible sadness for
the people I had left on the moun-
tain. The majority of them had mil-
itary backgrounds. I thought of how
they had learned in the service to
be powerful, effective, competent
with weapons; I thought of their
leaving the military and returning
to a world where those virtues were
far less valuable, even sometimes
scorned. How strange it must be to
go from the battle field, always on
high alert, capable of killing a fel-
low human, back to society, where
people walked around nakedly vul-
nerable. Our support for veterans
has never been strong, and it’s wors-
ening rapidly. It must be alienating
to feel devalued, to have to struggle
to retain the kind of self-worth the
military had built up in you, after
you have given a great deal to your
country. You start to believe thatinstitutions have failed you. And so
you begin to obsess over the end of
society. You stock up on guns be-
cause you’ve been trained to believe
that guns can protect you, and
while you’re at it, you stock up on
food and water and other things.
Yo u’ve b e c o me a p r e p p er. Yo u b e g i n
to imagine the end of society—
which you see replicated so often in
zombie films, television shows, di-
saster flicks, and dystopian literature
that you can imagine it vividly—
and perhaps you start to long for the
apocalypse. It would solve so much
of what makes you uncomfortable
about the contemporary world.
“Liberals are going to be one of
the first ones to die,” Rick Austin
said when he was featured in a jokey,
five-minute Daily Show segment
about liberal preppers. “Maybe in the
apocalypse, there won’t be conserva-
tives and liberals, there will just be
people that survive,” the correspon-
dent, Desi Lydic, noted hopefully.
Austin nodded and said, “Exactly.
And dead liberals.” (Then again, he
also said, “Hillary Clinton is running
the largest crime syndicate in Amer-
ica.”) There had been so much bit-
terness and fury toward the left at
Prepper Camp that I began to won-
der now whether preppers were actu-
ally hungry for a time of upheaval so
that they could finally watch liberals
get their comeuppance.
But then I saw, to my horror, an
uglier truth: that I was no better
than my prepper brethren. And
that because of my hypocrisy, I was
probably even worse.
Perhaps doomsday libertarians do
secretly long for a chance to rid the
earth of people who threaten their
supremacy; but there is something
equally anarchic in me that longs
for society to break so that we can
rebuild it to be kinder, more gener-
ous, more equitable. Deep down,
perhaps I am a prepper because I
believe that the only way we are go-
ing to pry the world’s wealth out of
the greedy, grasping hands of the
billionaires who are willfully killing
the environment is through a total
collapse of the status quo. Perhaps I
am a prepper because I have had
enough: I am goddamn ready for
the guillotines.FRANKLINSQUARE
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