There is a through line that connects several recent news headlines: the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Luigi Mangione murder trial, and Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy. It is the crisis of meaning in modern American life.
Mamdani — an avowed Democratic Socialist — cruising to a surprise victory in the New York City Democratic primary (and maintaining a durable polling lead for the general election since) spotlights the decline of secular materialism. New York, once thought to be ungovernable, became a playground for the rich and increasingly livable for the middle and working classes during 20 years of the competent Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg mayoralties. Two listless terms of Bill DeBlasio, to be followed shortly by Mamdani’s impending victory, give the lie to the belief that all voters want is a safe, prosperous and well-run city. What today’s NYC voters now seem to demand is collectivism, and (to borrow H. L. Mencken), they are about to get it good and hard.
The Mamdani phenomenon highlights that as religious observance has receded from civic life, young people have increasingly sought meaning in one of two unsatisfying ways: the consumerism produced by a free-market economy, or the pursuit of trendy causes with which to identify. The latter include “social justice,” radical environmentalism (qua Greta Thunberg), health care as a human right (see Mangione), and transgenderism, among others.
The first, experienced directly by the young via tech- and social-media enabled consumption of “content” and the related celebration of extravagance (perhaps best symbolized by a 2023 Morning Consult poll finding that 57 percent of Gen Z desire a career as influencers), may be losing steam. Mental health trends among younger Americans have deteriorated significantly over the last decade, with increases in sadness, hopelessness, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts, highlighting the mirage of spiritual satiety through consumption.
The current socialist moment exemplified by the popularity of politicians such as Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may in fact be the last gasp of dialectical materialism; in its final incarnation, less a framework for solving economic challenges than addressing metaphysical ennui. Indeed, to actually believe in collectivism requires something akin to religious fervor, as its myriad historical failures demand a willful suspension of disbelief.
Socialism not only fails to deliver on its economic promises; for a younger generation bereft of meaning, it is silent in response to the existential questions posed to it. Consider how Mamdani’s collectivist economic platform is also adorned by radical boutique causes — “globalizing the intifada” and the like — in an attempt to infuse bloodless redistributive policies with some inchoate higher purpose.
One discerns in this mashup of economics and purpose an echo of the “politics of meaning” championed during the early Clinton administration, when First Lady Hillary Clinton spoke of the need to counter the spiritual vacuum permeating American society through advocacy for social and ecological responsibility in public policy, an idea met at the time with considerable cynicism given its messenger. Nevertheless, even this faulty prescription correctly assessed the expanding spiritual desert of modern existence.
In contrast with democratic socialism, cause-driven activism — often derisively termed “the current thing” by critics — attempts to offer spiritual sustenance more directly than does centralized economic organization. However, even boutique causes are doomed to fail at this task.
Finding meaning through a single (or even a small handful) of causes may partially fill the hole left by fading religious observance and spirituality, but it’s difficult to organize one’s inner life solely around the precepts associated with, say, the environment or social justice.
Moreover, and as is often observed at public rallies and protest marches, a single-issue focus as one’s font of meaning can be rife with maximalism and outright fanaticism. Neither side at an abortion protest, for example, are typically characterized as advancing thoughtful, nuanced arguments.
The fatal flaw of attempting to derive meaning from causes, even when substantive and sincerely held, is their failure to present comprehensive belief systems and ethical frameworks by which to live. They may offer “meaning” in the abstract, but they fall well short of spiritual guidance or a larger roadmap for living a moral life. Critically, it is the behavioral guardrails ensuing from objective morality that cause-driven meaning lacks most.
The young seeker of purpose, estranged from traditional religious practice and skeptical of materialism, is thus left with the following choices: endorse socialist policies that worsen the lives of those they are designed to help, which (after having failed) are then doubled-down upon in a death spiral of immiseration; or elevate fashionable causes — the kind seen on Instagram stories that signal that the poster is a “good person” — which, irrespective of merit, offer no answers to life’s most enduring questions (such as “what is my purpose” and “what is a good life”).
Centering such causes as one’s moral order quickly devolves into a teleological approach to life, with ends justifying the means. Down that road, we find social media celebrating the cold-blooded murder of corporate executives and public figures, elite institutions valorizing mental illness (as with transgender advocacy), the fetishization of criminality and prioritization of offenders over victims (see: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Charlotte train murderer), and unchecked dysfunction of all kinds.
Last weekend’s Charlie Kirk memorial and his decade-long success with Turning Point USA may offer an alternative, and perhaps a small glimmer of hope for those young people lost in a dark night of moral relativism succored by collectivism and faddish activism.
In Phoenix, we witnessed an unabashed veneration of religious faith, and of objective morality more generally. Comprehensive spiritual belief systems not only nourish the soul’s desire for meaning, they are essential to a free and healthy society. As James Madison said in Federalist No. 10, “Our Constitution was only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Ironically, it is the freedom and prosperity we have enjoyed through a period of waning morality that has led us — particularly the youngest among us — to a hunger for meaning, which now actualizes itself in maladapted ways. Last weekend’s memorial may show the way home.
Richard Shinder is the managing partner of Theatine Partners, a financial consultancy.