…I dunno…but…it’s possible we passed some sort of rubicon…& words don’t mean what you think they do anymore…I mean…I don’t know how else to explain it?

How can the United States take advantage of the great but tricky strategic opportunity that the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny in Damascus offers us? Mainly through a combination of meaningful incentives for, and credible threats against, our enemies, frenemies, allies and would-be friends. Let’s go down the list.

…you see…it sounds like you can get away with using meanings for those words that you think you know & end up just thinking they’re from someone who understands less about that part of the world than they think…which…would be pretty normal, right? …someone who uses the word “frenemies” when talking about geopolitics…so…you know…it’s “tricky”…but…yes…they’d be about as smart as your boy bedbugs

…bret wouldn’t object to taking the new guy off the bad guy list & maybe opening up the sanctions on a quid pro quo basis

But U.S. sanctions on Syria, and H.T.S.’s status as a designated terrorist organization, should be lifted only on conditional bases. Will Syria’s new rulers allow freedom of worship for religious minorities and freedom of dress for women? Will they accept the de facto autonomy of Syria’s Kurds? Will they cooperate with international efforts to destroy ISIS? If H.T.S. really wants to cement a different relationship with Washington, it can also demand Russia’s military withdrawal from Syria, much as Egypt’s Anwar Sadat did in the 1970s.

…still…not having a bounty on the new guy of $10million…might indeed be a gesture of goodwill within the gift of even a lame duck…fair enough, I suppose…& all other things being equal

Already decimated by Israel, Hezbollah will struggle to survive as Lebanon’s dominant political entity if it doesn’t have an easy way to rearm itself.

…say that part is true

How? The legal basis is full application of the U.N. Security Council’s Resolution 1701, which insists “there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese state.”

…they’ve been about for a while 

Hezbollah has brazenly flouted the demand for 18 years.

…but…wait…did I miss a bit?

Donald Trump can help enforce it by declaring in one of his social media posts that he will not consider Israel bound to honor its cease-fire deal with Hezbollah until the group fully disarms.

…wanna unpack that one maybe just a little there, b-boy?

…how bound israel is to a deal that (iirc) forbids any military action from one side but only “offensive” such action from israel…is…a little fluid, you might say…but…the guy who isn’t president yet can say some shit on twitter & that’ll be more meaningful that anything in 20years for getting hezbollah to follow UN rules…that’s what you’re saying…that & the part where it works by saying the official position of the we-can’t-be-nazis-’cause-those-are-socialists party is that the we-can’t-commit-genocide-that’s-antisemitic-to-even-say IDF bogeyman can go ahead & let the dogs out

…if…& it is a pretty sizable if…but if it actually does work like that…what does that look like…to bret, I mean…because “my boy can wrap this up in a tweet” sounds like you think that shit is some sort of fire & forget, one-shot-one-kill bit of political genius…severing the gordian knot & all that shit…but…that’s unmitigated horseshit from the ground up?

…like…for real…someone explain to me how that works in bret’s head…because outside of it…where nobody asked him to work on that part before sliding on down his list of “I could fix the middle east before breakfast” like a perpetual motion machine made of self-congratulation…it seems a bit like taking out a full page ad in the NYT to broadcast that you quite fancy turning the middle east into the bigger theatre of the global hot war you just can’t get enough of & frankly the part where that isn’t being waged by soon-to-be-heads-of-state on social media is a bug not a feature

…&…it’s a bit fucking early in the day to be just sliding that kind of quantity of holy-shit-could-you-have-your-head-further-up-your-own-ass-than-this into a half a paragragh that’s basically just there as a segue

Ultimately, Hezbollah should be put to a fundamental choice: Participate in Lebanese politics as a normal political party that plays by the rules or face further military humiliation at the hands of the Zionist enemy.

…it only takes a tweet…& treating a hypothetical less-restrained-than-lately israeli military waging a punitive zionist campaign as…donnie’s regional pit bull he can aim like a tweet-guided ballistic missile

…anyway…bret’s on a roll…iran’s next…if they even look like they want a nuke they get deposed…or regime changed…or whatever…that’s the “choice” part…but there’s also a “dare”

The dare is also straightforward: Trump should propose what I’ve called “normalization for normalization” as a basis for improved ties with Iran. That is, America offers Iran full normalization of relations, including the lifting of economic sanctions and the reopening of embassies, in exchange for the normalization of Iranian foreign policy: a complete cessation of support for regional terror proxies like the Houthis and Hamas, and an irreversible and verifiable end to Iran’s nuclear program. Khamenei may reject the deal out of hand, since hostility to America lies at the core of the Islamic republic’s ideology, but it will give Iran’s people a standard to aspire to as they take heart from last week’s revolution in Damascus.

…that use of the colon sort of grammatically implies that cutting ties with the proxies & this mystical “irreversible and verifiable end” business equates to “the normalization of Iranian foreign policy”…but…it feels a little…I dunno…hopelessly fucking vague?

…don’t worry, though…bret’s got plenty of specific prescriptions…like

Trump can be especially helpful here by informing Hamas’s patrons in Qatar that the United States would revoke Qatar’s status as a major non-NATO ally and move the Al-Udeid air base — forward headquarters of the U.S. Central Command — to the United Arab Emirates if all of the hostages aren’t released by Jan. 20. Let the conniving Qataris figure out the rest.

…bret…as a NYT columnist…is of course fully apprised as to what practical, tactical, strategic & logistic differences would pertain to forwarding all mail to the forward HQ in the new spot he’s got picked out for it in the UAE…the qatari’s will cave so it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t exist…you just need a firm hand with these people, you see…it’s truly a masterclass in un-boiling the frog

Other players? The Turks will have to be deterred by Washington from trying to use Syria’s revolution as an opportunity to settle scores against the Kurds. That means, especially, maintaining our detachment of forces in eastern Syria. The Saudis will also need to demonstrate regional leadership by helping rebuild Syria and resuming negotiations for diplomatic normalization with Israel.

The Syria Opportunity [NYT]

…et voilà…simple as that…you particularly have to…admire doesn’t seem like the right word…but…the part where in all that russia gets reduced to a passing reference to newly-reformed terrorist organisation that just pulled a coup telling vlad to do one so they could be better friends with washington…as part of the checklist of sanctions-dropping quids pro quo that will complete their transfiguration into the vehicle by which all bret’s dreams come true

…meanwhile…adults in various rooms are

On Wednesday, Christopher Wray told his F.B.I. colleagues that he would step down as director by the end of President Biden’s term. His statement was a perfect example of bureaucratic deference. “I’ve decided the right thing for the bureau is for me to serve until the end of the current administration in January and then step down,” Wray said. He wants to “avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.”

…trying not to panic seems to be about the size of it

But is something else going on?

…probably quite a lot, really…hence the incipient panic pervading the whole mess…but…go on, then…what part in particular would you be referring to?

By stepping down now, as the conservative writer Erick Erickson observed, Wray has created a “legal obstacle to Trump trying to bypass the Senate confirmation process.”

…ok…great…let’s do that, then…he needs obstacles…& he shouldn’t get to bypass stuff…but…he hasn’t had to ditch the fox news dipshit…or gabbard…he’s very possibly going to get patel…& the senate & the courts aren’t not-on-his-side…so, also…how’s that work, when it’s at home?

Here’s why. According to the Vacancies Reform Act, if a vacancy occurs in a Senate-confirmed position, the president can temporarily replace that appointee (such as the F.B.I. director) only with a person who has already received Senate confirmation or with a person who’s served in a senior capacity in the agency (at the GS-15 pay scale) for at least 90 days in the year before the resignation.

…ok…so…assuming it means anything…that’s a pretty clear not-that-fucking-guy, then?

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s chosen successor at the F.B.I., meets neither of these criteria. He’s not in a Senate-confirmed position, and he’s not been a senior federal employee in the Department of Justice in the last year. That means he can’t walk into the job on Day 1. Trump will have to select someone else to lead the F.B.I. immediately, or the position will default to the “first assistant to the office.”

In this case, that means the position would default to Paul Abbate, who has been the deputy director of the F.B.I. since 2021, unless Trump chooses someone else, and that “someone else” cannot be Patel, at least not right away.

The bottom line is that the Senate has to do its job. Wray is foreclosing a presidential appointment under the Vacancies Reform Act, and — as I wrote in a column last month — the Supreme Court has most likely foreclosed the use of a recess appointment to bypass the Senate.

…if that doesn’t do it for you french even threw in a federalist papers reference

[…] It narrows Trump’s options, and it places the Senate at center stage. In Federalist No. 76, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the advice and consent power was designed to be “an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the president, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters.”

Patel is just such an “unfit character,” and now it’s senators’ responsibility to protect the American republic from his malign influence — if, that is, they have the courage to do their jobs.

Did Christopher Wray Just Defy Donald Trump? [NYT]

…you’re killing me, here…if the senate were filled with people who carry the (r) & had courage…or really even just a meaningful understanding of their jobs in the sense of what it might look like to fulfil the responsibilities of their office rather than merely to do whatever performative dance is required to keep the fundraising rolling in & their seat on the gravy train…well…the next president wouldn’t be papaya pol pot…so…that seems…sub-optimal?

In our candidate-centric political system, every president is a singular figure in his own way, whose appeal to the public is at least a little distinct from that of his party. But presidents still have a relationship to that party, and their choice of cabinet members and other high-level officials can tell any close observer a good deal about the nature of that relationship.

This is more than the standard observation that personnel is policy; to see who gets what job is to get a better sense of the coalition that put the president into office.
[…]
So it goes for Donald Trump, as he announces his plans, chooses his subordinates and moves closer to beginning his second term as president.
[…]
As a candidate for president, Trump openly distanced himself from the mainstream of the Republican Party. He disavowed the party’s position on abortion, despite appointing the judges who helped overturned Roe v. Wade, and he rejected Project 2025 as unrelated to his campaign. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he said over the summer on Truth Social. “I have no idea who is behind it.”

As president-elect, he has somewhat reversed course. He plans to return Russ Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025, to prominence as head of the Office of Management and Budget. He has also looked to a handful of more traditional Republicans to fill a few high-profile roles. When they are, inevitably, confirmed, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida will be Trump’s secretary of state, and Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota will lead his Department of Homeland Security. Representative Elise Stefanik will serve as U.N. ambassador and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota will take secretary of the Interior.

But Trump intends to fill a large portion of his cabinet with figures who would otherwise struggle to find a place in a typical presidential administration of either party. There is the scandal-ridden Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host slated to be the nation’s secretary of defense. There is Robert Kennedy Jr., namesake of one of the most famous Democrats of the 20th century, chosen to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services. There’s Tulsi Gabbard, a one-time Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, tapped to be Trump’s director of national intelligence. And to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Trump wants to replace Christopher Wray — who he brought in to replace James Comey in 2017 — with an outright sycophant, Kash Patel, last seen threatening Trump’s political opponents with criminal prosecution and publishing children’s books (“The Plot Against the King”) glorifying Trump as though he were some secular deity.

For all of the incompetence and mismanagement of the George W. Bush administration, it is hard to imagine him selecting, as Trump has, Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as if a large and important bureaucracy could be easily managed by a television personality. (See Trump’s own experience as president for evidence that this is a dubious proposition.)

There are others. Kari Lake, failed Arizona statewide candidate, has been picked to serve as ambassador to Mexico. The onetime wrestling entertainment executive Linda McMahon has been selected to lead the Department of Education. A second Fox Host, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, has been elevated to the role of surgeon general of the United States, and still another Fox contributor, Monica Crowley, has been picked to be chief of protocol at the State Department.

Compare this group with virtually any other Republican White House or cabinet and you’ll see a team with shockingly little governing experience and almost no connection to the institutional Republican Party outside of donations made to affiliated political action committees. Trump is not picking from within the broad universe of the Republican Party; he has no interest in most of the politicians, policy entrepreneurs and experienced bureaucrats who comprise most Republican administrations. He is interested, more or less, in who he sees on TV.

…& the personal criminal fealty thing because he thinks it’s all supposed to work like the sopranos

This dynamic also underscores one of the most important — and yet under-remarked on — elements of the Republican Party in the age of Trump: its fundamental political impairment. Like its rival, the Republican Party is, to use a recent term of art, hollow. “At the heart of hollowness lies parties’ incapacity to meet public challenges,” Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld observe in “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.” And for the Republican Party, this looks like a party that moves through American politics in the form of a “shambolic, lumbering, and decidedly dangerous mess” whose incapacity is “not just the absence of a common public purpose but, more ominously, the inability to control dangerous tendencies located ever more centrally inside the party.”

The institutions of the Republican Party — the establishment, as it were — have no capacity to influence, shape or discipline any of the actors who operate under the Republican umbrella. This has been true for some time — it is a large part of how Trump could execute a hostile takeover in the first place — and it is especially true at this moment, when the party is little more than a patronage network centered on the personalist rule of an American caudillo and his billionaire allies, whose money can be deployed to circumvent party structures as much as bolster them. That Elon Musk could decide to run the Republican campaign apparatus and then subsequently make himself Trump’s unofficial co-president is evidence enough of the problem.

…&…ok…thinking what-if-he’d-lost is by definition wishful thinking

To the extent that there is anything left of a national ideological or programmatic agenda, it is a reflection either of Trump’s idiosyncratic preoccupations or those of the cadres of ideologues who have opportunistically latched on to the incoming president. Put another way, consider the very plausible world in which Trump lost his bid for a second term. A two-time loser, he would have been a clear burden on the party’s ability to win. If he leaves or is forced out of the political scene, what happens to the Republican Party? Does it quickly reshape itself? Or does it enter a period of terminal crisis now that it is bereft of a figure who organized its priorities for nearly a decade?

In the absence of Trump, does the Republican Party look like an entity that can build or mobilize anything like a working electoral majority? Even now, in this world, it is clear that the president-elect’s appeal is distinct from that of his party; Republicans lost four Senate races in states that he won and the party’s House majority teeters on a knife’s edge. All of this is made worse by Trump’s indifference to party building, as well as his demands for loyalty. What is good for him — paying his legal bills, for example — may not be good for the ability of the party to succeed and win.

The weakness of the institutional Republican Party, the fragility of the Republican majorities, and the volatility of Trump himself are a recipe for political instability and chaos. It all serves as a reminder that whenever Trump does leave the scene, he will likely leave behind a Republican Party that will struggle to find an identity outside of his reach and influence.

Donald Trump Is Not a Party Guy [NYT]

…it’s…not news…but it’s still “the news”…you know?

Trump and his allies are more than willing to kick an adversary when he or she is down. Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, described by email the probable Republican agenda:

Authoritarians tend to target certain institutions to cement their control: typically the media, higher education, the bureaucracy, the legal system and the military. To varying degrees, Trump has promised to control, purge or punish all of these groups. He has pledged to remove woke bureaucrats and generals, and to protect free speech in the media and on campus by punishing organizations deemed to be outliers.

Moynihan stressed that “this is not about wokeness or free speech; it is about Trump using government powers to engage in selective punishments and purges on a scale we really have not seen before.”

Perhaps most striking is Trump’s plan to excise a broad swath of the top ranks in the military, the crucial arm of government constraining or allowing authoritarian methods by the president.

…c’mon…how’d you expect a fox news pundit’s idea of a military to work out?

“I would fire them. You can’t have a woke military,” Trump said in a Fox News interview last June. And in a post-election podcast in November, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice to become secretary of defense, said, “Any general that was involved — general, admiral, whatever — that was involved in any of the D.E.I. woke shit, it’s got to go.”

The Trump transition team, The Wall Street Journal reported, is exploring the possibility of having Trump issue an executive order creating a “warrior board” of former ranking military personnel empowered to recommend removal of any three- or four-star generals found to be unfit for leadership.

Moynihan wrote that he has

taught and been impressed by a good number of military officers. The idea that the armed services is overrun with wokeness is simply not grounded in reality. “Wokeness” is really just an excuse to purge officials who might be expected to be less loyal to Trump.

Along similar lines, the American Accountability Foundation, a conservative group funded in part by the Heritage Foundation, was established in 2022 for the explicit purpose of “identifying and shining a spotlight on the high-ranking civil servants within the Departments of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) and Justice (D.O.J.) who are likely to thwart an incoming conservative administration’s immigration agenda.”

On Oct. 23, the Accountability Foundation announced publication of the “first tranche” of names and photos — the “top 10 targets”— of what it called “subversive, leftist bureaucrats serving in the federal government who cannot be trusted to enforce our immigration laws under a future administration intent on securing our border.”

…so…what’s it gonna be?

At the same time, the conscious adoption of less controversial positions on cultural issues threatens to drive more radical constituencies “into abstention and sectarian party politics,” Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke who has studied the rise of populism in Europe, wrote by email.

But, Kitschelt continued,

the sustained pressure of an authoritarian Republican president and a Republican Party bending to that president’s will could make it more likely for Democrats to coordinate and converge around political positions that promise electoral success with moderate voters while also preventing a retreat of more radical supporters into abstention, given how high the stakes are of the political game.

In other words, according to Kitschelt, the prospect of sustained defeat will be the mother of moderation:

Progressives in the Democratic Party have intolerantly preached distinctive conceptions of (group) tolerance that a majority of Americans have found to produce new forms of authoritarian intolerance — intolerance both at the level of individual, personal social interactions as well as at the level of group relations and political representation.

The apostles of an ethics of pure conviction — the uncompromising pursuit of intolerant moral postulates, no matter what may be the sacrifices, trade-offs and prospects — will have to give way to an ethics of responsibility that weighs the opportunities to create political majorities, even if more far-reaching objectives of Democratic politics, as interpreted by this or that party wing, have to be put on the back burner, and probably permanently.

Losing political parties always go through a period of recrimination, blame and introspection, but this time the grieving among Democrats has taken on a tone of remorse and futility, a sense that Trump has tapped into a deepening well of anger and frustration that has the potential to become the dominant force in American politics for years to come.

Will America turn into an authoritarian one-party state as Trump seizes power and resources? Or will the United States once again — as it did during the American Revolution, the Civil War and two world wars — demonstrate the resilience and creativity that carried it through crises in the past?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/opinion/democratic-party-wilderness-trump.html

…america…it’s a funny old place…for a place that’s arguably not even all that old as these things go

I mention all this as background for non-Americans reading about what, from a distance, may look like the unusually sanguine and, in some cases, bizarrely joyous responses to the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on a Manhattan street last week. In an internal police report obtained by the New York Times, Luigi Mangione, the alleged gunman who was arrested in Pennsylvania on Monday morning, was said to have described the murder as a “symbolic takedown”. He was also quoted as saying: “Frankly these parasites simply had it coming.” What remains shocking – at least to those not reliant on US healthcare – is that these ramblings of an alleged killer were, in the hours after the news of the murder broke, widely shared and in some cases celebrated by the American public.

The day after the shooting, the reactions online were swift and brutal. “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers”; “sending prior authorization, denied claims, collections and prayers to his family”; “after they [meet] their required deductible I might be able to supplement some care”. Amazon had to pull merchandise bearing the slogan “deny, defend, depose”, a suite of tactics known to be used by insurers to stall claims that was apparently inscribed on bullet casings at the site of the killing. Even in the sober press, there was an undeniable “he had it coming” vibe to some of the comments.

Since Mangione’s arrest and as more details about his troubled past have emerged, those claiming him as a Robin Hood-type figure are rapidly quietening down. Still, a lack of sympathy for the victim remains. A leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US is medical debt, and even for those who can afford it, the constant drip of bills, the time-suck of fighting with insurers and the temptation to skip vital screenings is stressful.

I had good insurance. And yet in any given month, the top drawer of my desk would contain a stack of correspondence from my insurers informing me that my claim had been denied or only partly covered. A small example: my policy’s provision for routine cancer screenings was $300 annually, when the actual cost of a single mammogram in New York can run into the thousands. As one of my doctors once said to me: “Really, they just want us to die.”
[…]
None of this has anything to do with a very troubled 26-year-old allegedly making a decision to commit murder. Thompson wasn’t to blame for US healthcare, and Mangione isn’t an American folk hero. Still, it does explain the callousness of some responses. I haven’t lived in the US for five months, but thanks to the US post office’s mail forwarding service I’m on invoice number three for a $1,300 bill dating back to February, which has been denied by my insurer because the ER doctor I saw and had no control over choosing wasn’t on their list of approved clinicians. I think I’m going to ignore it.

Does the bizarre reaction to the killing of a health insurance boss make sense? Only in America [Guardian]

…so…probably shouldn’t be entirely surprising if some folks…draw some conclusions

They want to buy seeds for their garden so they can grow food to preserve and stash in the basement. The kids pet the puppies at breeder booths selling guard dogs, the father exchanges opinions about the best weapons to cache, and the mother gathers pamphlets about hoarding gold and the crises of the international economy.

Quietly between booths, old copies of the novel The Turner Diaries (1978) by the white nationalist William Pierce are passed from hand to hand, while speakers give lectures about water filtration systems and the moral imperative of self-reliance.

As Chris Turpin, the CEO of the Be Prepared Expo, said in an interview: “Preparedness helps you from eating your neighbour.”

…I mean…I get by just not being prepared to eat mine…but…each to their own, I guess?

One way to forestall eating your neighbour is to stock up on supplies at Costco. In any US suburb, a family of four rolls a cart through the cavernous warehouse, placing a ReadyWise food bucket of emergency rations next to a box of muffins and packs of socks. They return to an unremarkable home in a neighbourhood that could be anywhere.

There are no trap doors, underground bunkers, or stashes of gold. But there is a gun safe in the garage, long-lasting emergency provisions on a designated shelf in the pantry, and Ring cameras installed inside and outside the house. The kids have their own LifeWater straws to filter freshwater, and their parents watch the news carefully for signs of growing instability in global affairs, of interrupted trade relations, of the return of Jesus Christ.

…wait…what was that last one?

Welcome to the diverse world of prepping.

…so…we’re all bunkering down until the second bloody coming?

Why do people doomsday prep? We approach this question in our book Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States (2024) without speculating about their psychology. As political scientists, we are not equipped to assess what goes on in people’s heads, much less whether they sincerely or genuinely believe these things. We have no idea if preppers truly believe the end is near, are merely hedging their bets, or if it helps them cope with some underlying trauma.

We also have no idea, of course, if “the end” is actually near. Rather, we ask, is prepping a fringe activity gaining mainstream traction, or is it as American as apple pie?

Prepping has been part of the American ethos well before neoliberalism and even before our contemporary industrial supply chains. Americans have been urged and trained to prep as children in various scouting organisations, as homesteaders given a plot of land by the federal government in the colonial project of “taming” the west, and as steady, patriotic citizens prepared to survive nuclear attack to keep the US alive in their bunkers.

Even after the bunker market floundered in the 1960s, the bunker exceeded its limits as an object and has transformed into a subjectivity, a way of life. This is the “bunkerised” citizen.

…it’s their book…if they don’t want to mention siege mentality that’s their business…I guess?

Bunkerisation explains the phenomenon of prepping in the US. The concept allows us to recast prepping as a matter of institutional development, as well as a process of how everyday life in a neoliberal order is oriented toward the logic of the bunker.

This does not mean that Americans are in a mad dash, as they were in the 1950s and 1960s, to construct fallout shelters during the cold war in the case of nuclear conflagration. Rather, the logic of the bunker shapes how Americans relate to each other, the state, and how they construct their domestic lives, as a matter of individual isolation, preparation and savvy consumption.

…even if apparently a bunch of these bunkers are more by way of mental constructs

Bunkerisation is not an indictment of contemporary US culture or a meditation on the moral failings of irrational consumers. It is an instance of consumer society, but one that is fully within the US mainstream and which makes safety a private family matter. This orientation paradoxically reflects a patriotic commitment to being an American by isolating oneself from other Americans in times of crisis.

Homesteaders in the American Redoubt of northern Idaho (a proposed homeland for white Christians), suburban preppers in Utah and wealthy venture capitalists with bugout-ready helicopters all exist within the bunkerised world, together. Multiple psychological orientations, worldviews and political ideologies find common motivation in bunkerisation.

…probably throw some rugged individalism on there for good measure

Being an American often means understanding that, during instances of calamity, we all must do what we can to protect ourselves and our families. The tension in this construction of Americanness is both one of magnitude and responsibility. That is, if the power goes out because of a power-grid failure and one does not have the requisite amount of water on hand or did not buy a generator, that might prompt a discussion of individual responsibility, or at least about making sure people have the resources to make it to the other side of catastrophe.

That tidy, if contained, discussion, however, does not take into account the magnitude of the crisis. What happens if superstorms cause widespread infrastructure damage and the government response is uncoordinated, insufficient, or otherwise ineffective?

This is squarely a social question about political will and collective action to confront shared threats together. Yet bunkerisation encourages us to see the prepping American as a vector of individual and consumer responsibility, and not a question of the social scale of meeting shared threats. Instead, the prepared American is asked to focus only on security practices through consumption at price points that their means allow.
[…]
Nanny cams, firearms accumulation, the proliferation of gated communities and private security services are all manifestations of a bunkerised society. More than preparing for anticipated episodes of disruption or violence, a bunkerised society maintains a permanent state of readiness, not as a feature of a subcultural association, like doomsday preppers or homesteaders, but as a condition of living in the hollowed-out shell of a state that does not take infrastructural stability and basic need satisfaction as a right, but as a good one must supply for oneself through consumer choices on the market.
[…]
Looking at bunkerisation in this way helps us get past treating preparing as a matter of smart American consumers building a cache of goods to make it through troubled times, and it helps us avoid merely gawking at unfamiliar lifestyles and motivations.

It asks us to take seriously the shared threats that citizens in a political society face and to treat those threats as collective action problems instead of reasons to close the bunker hatch. This is no small task, because the institutional and ideological dimensions that we flesh out have produced a prepping American who treats threats as personal responsibility, which is reinforced by a neoliberal regime of degraded state involvement.
[…]
The myth of the yeoman frontiersperson taking individual responsibility for any catastrophe is baked into the bunkerised life of the prepping American. Overcoming that is not simply a matter of attitude, but a political project of reinvigorating the collective dimensions of public life.

Always prepared: why prepping for doomsday is a logical choice for many Americans [Guardian]

…well…gee…that’s a cheerful thought…how much longer until it’s the weekend?