Although the country has suffered through far higher crime rates and similar periods of deep political division, “we’re in uncharted territory in terms of anxiety,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum and a former Boston police official. “With the George Floyd murder, war in Ukraine, the questioning of elections, people don’t know who to trust. Who would think that in an iconic place like Highland Park, you would need to post snipers on rooftops on the Fourth of July? But that’s what we’ve come to.”

“Nothing feels safe anymore,” he continued.

After years of violence and the social isolation brought by the pandemic, rhetoric on both shores of the national cultural and political gulf focuses on a yearning for security. On one side, it’s expressed as a craving for “safe spaces” and calls for acceptance of others. On the opposite side, it’s a nostalgia for a perceived golden age of social consensus.

In both cases, the political rhetoric reflects underlying jitters that lead to the kinds of street panics seen in May, when people emerging from the Barclays Center sports arena in Brooklyn stampeded toward safety after some heard pops that sounded like gunshots. In the panic, at least 10 people were injured, trampled to the pavement by others running, they thought, for their lives. In the end, there was no evidence of any gunfire.