Financially excluded groups sought socialized risk, not a return to older risk regimes.

Evidence

My argument, contrary to the “atavistic crowd” explanations of the Gilded Age, is that farmers, outcasts, and grassroots speculators deeply understood the importance of modern financial fictions. Their incipient shared speculative imagination did not seek a return to the previous status quo of either providential or actuarian risk control, but strove instead for new forms of insurance that would allow them to benefit from the (economic as well as political) possibilities arising from speculation. Most notably, the populist movement challenged the personal assumption of risk and competed for guarantors and forms of socialized risk that would allow it some access to the gains of speculative markets. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 132

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s framing: financialized populism as speculative bets under uncertainty—here the historical precedent is grassroots demand for socialized risk, not rejection of speculation. — connects to: Social security was built on corporate risk-management logic, not egalitarian citizenship. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 692