"In the late nineteenth century, the Boy Scouts of America introduced survivalist techniques and emergency preparedness to middle-class families, worried that their sons would become city-softened men in quickly urbanizing America. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, trends like Scouting and the Handicraft Movement encouraged men specially to become self-reliant and ruggedly individualistic in the face of the growing industrial economy and vanishing frontier life. With the advent of the Cold War, doomsday prepping emerged in response to the threat of thermonuclear annihilation. All over the country, families stocked bunkers and children took part in bomb drills. A slew of threats real and imagined since then has spurred on new waves of prepping: terrorism, Y2K, an Ebola pandemic, the Mayan-Calendar apocalypse, and even total environmental collapse. In Be Prepared, the political theorists Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray examine the history of prepping in the United States. They argue that these isolated outbursts of prepping are in fact part of a single lineage: manifestations of a general anxiety about life in the modern United States. Prepping is emblematic of a frustration with an industrialized society that has failed to produce a buoyant middle class, and the anxiety that comes with America's dominance on the world stage and all the threats that attend that status. Through the lens of social theory, the authors argue that individualist prepping is a response to the failure of the liberal democratic state, an anticipation that the cooperation behind the democracy will disappear as soon as it stops functioning. Prepping in the United States, then, is more than anticipating disaster; it is a loss of faith in democracy and a tacit belief that America is a failed state"--
