The Doomsday Prepper Caucus
That’s because the show is a microcosm of something else stirring in our country, something more foreboding. The ominous prophecies of government tyranny, financial meltdown and violent anarchy featured on Preppers inform more than just the survivalist movement circa 2013. They’re also being absorbed into contemporary conservatism, which has increasingly bought into these same doomsday storylines hook, line and bunker.
Rose McDermott, a political scientist at Brown University, recently published a study in the American Journal of Political Science that analyzed people’s susceptibility to succumb to fearful thinking. In it, she found a correlation between heightened fear and current conservative attitudes toward immigration and segregation. “It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative,” McDermott explains. “People who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don’t know, and things they don’t understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security.”
This latent conservative anxiety is also the bubbling undercurrent that runs throughout the 60-odd-year history of the survivalism movement in America. A vast majority of its adherents are undoubtedly harmless “small-s survivalists,” as then Chicago Tribune reporter James Coates calls them in his 1987 book, Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right. But Coates also points out that the survivalist movement’s origins nonetheless rest upon a virulently right-wing, or “big-S,” foundation of violence, racism, and anti-Semitism.
“The godfather of latter-day American survivalism of both the big-S and the small-s variety is Robert DePugh,” writes Coates. In the late 1950s, DePugh’s thinking began to coalesce around racist conspiracy theories and tales of imminent societal collapse, many of which form the rootstock of today’s apocalyptic scenarios. By the 1960s, DePugh had founded the Minutemen, the notorious precursor of the anti-government resistance group Posse Comitatus. Across the decades, these Survivalist Right groups and their spinoffs have developed a frightening reputation for criminal activity and violent behavior. Just last summer, five men, including one with suspected Posse Comitatus ties, were arrested in Louisiana for the murder of two sheriff’s deputies.
In recent years, a sort of rebranding has taken place within the survivalist movement to distance it from the poisonous “big-S” worldview as well as from fatalistic End Times religious sects. As a result, around 2008, the more artful, less incendiary term “prepper” began to appear on survivalist message boards, and it has gained momentum ever since. Nevertheless, it’s almost impossible for prepper types to avoid encountering the extremist elements within the movement. “When the small-s survivalists set out to swap ideas with like-minded people,” Coates writes, “they don’t have very far to look before running up against the Survival[ist] Right.”