Speculative social insurance bonds by excluding marginalized groups, not redistributing.

Evidence

I argued that the specific kind of symbolic social insurance involved in neopopulist movements like the Tea Party in the United States and Brexiteers in the United Kingdom contains overlooked invocations of mutuality and interdependency. Yet, as both these cases demonstrate, such appeals are a far cry from postwar forms of social insurance like those established by the New Deal and the Beveridgean welfare state—let alone more radical types of collective action aimed at reclaiming power and squashing entrenched inequalities. The insurance function of speculation seems to operate on affective, performative, and exclusionary registers—a form of social protection made possible by forging a sense of chauvinistic bonding and the exclusion of migrants, Muslims, people of color, and other marginalized groups. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 296

Categorization

• XREF: Ties into the reader’s existing understanding of how imagined communities form through exclusionary bonding. — connects to: Speculation and insurance jointly define community boundaries that ignore traditional class lines. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 555; Social security’s architecture was built on private risk-management and gendered-entitlement assumptions — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 692