Insecurity is the new inequality

DONALD TRUMP'S SECOND PRESIDENTIAL TERM HAS already been accompanied by a cascade of unnerving political and natural events-from the U.S.'s leaving the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, to the nighttime firings of inspectors general and pardons of the Jan. 6 rioters, to the raids targeting immigrants in a number of cities and the wildfires roaring through swaths of Los Angeles.

- - BY ALISSA QUART

Each new occurrence, in turn, fills many with a greater and greater sense of insecurity.

This is our new normal: uncertainty all the time, at every moment, in all places. I call it "terra infirma," an inversion of terra firma, or solid ground. The ground beneath our feet is perpetually shifting. And it's hard to keep our balance.

This constant uncertainty has an effect, as well, on how I think about my work as the director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. I've started to consider insecurity as the new inequality. The problem isn't just the massive gap between haves and have-nots, though that does keep widening. For those who lack the resources to absorb each new blow, the constant instability hits hardest of all-but in truth, this insecurity affects almost everyone except the wealthiest.

Author and activist Astra Taylor's book The Age of Insecurity has shaped and inspired my understanding of how insecurity manifests in the economy and society right now. Taylor argues that a wide variety of crises, from rising inequality to eroding mental health, have insecurity at their root. In the past decade or so, social researchers have identified proliferating categories of uncertainty.

These include not only the political insecurity we are experiencing right now but also more bespoke varieties, like transportation insecurity (the difficulty of reaching destinations because of damaged buses and trains) and informational insecurity (owing to content that has been muddled and sullied by deepfakes, disinformation, and paranoia). There are also the politicians who obsess over tariffs or "illegal immigrants" supposedly taking jobs, ensuring voters feel a certain degree of insecurity.

These politicians then offer themselves up as the voice of common sense, the irony being, of course, that their falsely secure rhetoric just augments our perception of chaos.