1. It's a lazy, social distancing Sunday, so to allow you to avoid other humans for at least a few minutes, I'd like to present this thread on survivalism (often now called prepping/prepperism), which is more complex (and more interesting) than some might think.
2. In a generic sense, survivalism is simply a concept: preparedness for a natural (or other) disaster. At its most basic, it includes stockpiling of food and other key supplies. In this generic sense, survivalism has been around in the U.S. forever, even finding its ways into
3. institutions such as the LDS (newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/prepar…). But what I am talking about here is not survivalism in is generic sense, but modern American survivalism, which is a specific subculture and movement in the U.S. It is not in itself an ideological movement, but it
4. strongly overlaps with some, as we'll see. Generic survivalist concepts began to grow into a subculture centered around survivalism in the 1970s, originally largely as an outgrowth of Cold War fear and anxiety over nuclear war (think of the bomb shelter craze of the 50s/60s).
5. As the subculture cohered, it developed shared concepts, shared language, shared practices and ideas. The term "survivalist" itself was popularized in the mid-70s by one of the early survivalist "prophets," Kurt Saxon (an...interesting person). The early survivalist
6. subculture of the 1970s/80s heavily overlapped with various extreme right movements in the U.S., from white supremacists to anti-government extremists to anti-communist conspiracy theorists. However, not every survivalist was necessarily a right-wing extremist.
7. The survivalist subculture/movement got a boost in the early 1980s, when there was a surge of right-wing extremism in the US, propelled by the serious recession of those years and the huge farm crisis. Early Reagan era Cold War anxieties also fed into survivalism's growth.
8. Survivalism was such a fad that it even surfaced in a (bad) Hollywood film, "Survivors," starring Walter Matthau and Robin Williams. If you are interested in getting a taste of survivalism of this era, there are two short documentaries well worth watching. The first is
9. the 1982 BBC documentary "The Survivalists," which you can actually view online: archive.org/details/Surviv…
10. The second documentary, which I've seen countless times because one of my training colleagues in the anti-terrorism program I used to work for used to show it all the time, is the 1988 "Knocking on Armageddon's Door." pbs.org/pov/watch/knoc…
11. I don't know anywhere you can stream "Knocking on Armageddon's Door," but if someone finds a place, please let me know, because it's been twenty years since I last saw it.
12. As the 80s surge of extremism waned, so too did the fad stage of the survivalist subculture. But it never faded away and in the 1990s, when the militia movement emerged, the survivalist subculture found yet another friendly overlap with a far right movement.
13. I should note that many people deemed "survivalists" are not necessarily survivalists. Many media articles over the years have referred to various murderers or other violent people who either lived by themselves or had outdoor skills as "survivalists." Be leery of that
14. label in that context. In the 2000s, the survivalist subculture unexpectedly achieved fad status again, this time largely due to a new wave of younger survivalists, typically dubbing themselves "preppers." The prepper generation of survivalists has tended to be more varied
15. than the previous generation, including "urban preppers," and has had somewhat less overlap with far right movements, although that is still where the bulk of "ideologically-oriented survivalism" lies. The growth of the Internet and, later, social media, strongly facilitated
16. the rapid spread and popularity of "prepperism." It is not a coincidence that the period 2008-2011 saw 1) the strong dominance of social media, 2) the rapid resurgence of anti-gov't extremists like the militia movement and the sovereign citizen movement, and 3) the spread
17. of survivalist concepts like the "American Redoubt," a theoretical haven for survival-minded right-wing "patriots" in the inland northwest.
To my knowledge, nobody's written a full history of the modern US survivalist subculture, which is a shame, because it's fascinating.
To my knowledge, nobody's written a full history of the modern US survivalist subculture, which is a shame, because it's fascinating.
