American Dread: Prepping as Prefigurative Politics

• In Event: States and Sovereignty

Abstract

Theorists argue that modern society is increasingly defined by existential risk. Ordinary Americans seem to agree—as many as 20 million currently qualify as “preppers,” who allocate significant time and resources to the practice of disaster preparedness. Indeed, there is growing evidence that prepping is not unique to the rural, right-wing survivalists of popular imagination. This paper uses a comparative ethnographic approach to examine the increasing salience of prepping across the political spectrum, making three theoretical contributions. First, I advance the sociology of risk and uncertainty by articulating how prepping mediates individual experiences of threat and ambiguity in a context of existential challenges, declining institutions, and political polarization. Second, I take seriously the sociology of emotion to improve our understanding of how fear and anxiety operate as organizing principles in a risk society. Third, while political sociology is centrally concerned with state-society relations, it has failed to fully grapple with how these dynamics evolve in a risk society. I argue that the widespread adoption of prepping signifies on both the left and the right a form of prefigurative politics that rejects lone wolf approaches to risk management in favor of direct action and community solidarity, contrary to dominant popular and scholarly narratives. This study thus puts the everyday practices of prepping in sociological perspective by exploring what it means for political and civic life that prepping is now a mainstream cultural script.

Author

• Kirstin Krusell, University of California-Berkeley