Meaning Doesn’t Come From the Government

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 07, 2026

 

I think the crisis of meaning in America is a serious problem. But I think the unserious way a lot of people talk about it stems from a misunderstanding of the meaning of crisis.

 

I’ll explain that, but first let’s note that today is October 7. I feel an obligation to write about it, but don’t really have anything new to say about that horrible crime of three years ago.

 

I should say that I choose the word “crime” deliberately, because I don’t like the word “event.” It makes it sound like a thing that just happened, rather than an organized and planned atrocity. It’s a bit like when people talk about “gun crimes” or “gun deaths” or how “X many” people were killed by guns. Guns have no agency, people who pull triggers do. People who sit in rooms and plan rape and murder aren’t a force of nature or inanimate objects. They’re rapists and murderers. The October 7 attack was an event in a terminological sense, but it was a planned event, carried out by people who think the murder and rape of Jews is something to celebrate because they’re Jews. October 7 wasn’t something that happened, like a storm or earthquake, so much as something that was done.

 

I bring this up not just to mark a solemn anniversary.

 

Israelis have been at war almost nonstop since then. They are in a war for their survival. If you disagree, that’s fine. I think you’re wrong. But even those who are mistaken should be able to admit that Israelis think they are in a war for their survival. I don’t mean—or mean solely—that it’s a war for the survival of their nation or their “way of life.” I mean Israelis believe that they are fighting people who want to see them all dead. If October 7 is insufficient evidence of that, skeptics can consult the statements of various terrorist organizations and regimes that say as much all the time.

 

And for that reason Israel is not having a crisis of meaning. In Yiddish, you might say they have mer vi genug—more meaning than they can handle.

 

I have never met an Israeli who wouldn’t like it otherwise. Oh, I’m sure some exist. Every society has such people. But I’ve never met an Israeli who doesn’t crave to live in a “normal country.” I don’t mean an un-Jewish country—I just mean a country where people get to live normal lives, pursue normal ambitions, professional or personal. Israelis were much happier when the buzz was all about being a “startup nation,” not a nation at war.

 

When a country is at war, it gets a lot of meaning out of war. Nationalism is always purest when a nation is at war. That doesn’t mean nationalism is a synonym for militarism. But nothing brings out nationalism more than military mobilization for a necessary war. This is why William James wanted to solve an earlier crisis of meaning with what he called “the moral equivalent of war.” He wanted society to organize itself as if it were at war, because war brings out the best in men.

 

I’ve written about this too many times to dwell on it here. But this does get me to my problem with how a lot of people talk about the crisis of meaning. I caught this clip from a National Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem. John Anderson, an Australian politician, was speaking on “Authentic Leadership in an Age of Radical Personal Autonomy and Rising Hatred.” He said something interesting. Talking about the Oxford and Cambridge “King and Country” debate, he said:

 

The world’s most famous debating society in 1933 overwhelmingly resolved that “this House will under no circumstances fight and die for king and country.” That is a declaration of a loss of faith in your culture. It is a declaration that you will not put at risk your own well-being for the broader good. It is a loss of confidence that we see echoes of today in our own cultures.

 

And yet, just a few short years later, as we’re reminded by the story of Dunkirk. ... those same young Brits were fighting over the skies of London in their Spitfires and their Merlins, risking all and frequently paying the ultimate price to defend their homeland and freedom and all that is good and noble and beautiful.

 

(Now, I should clean up a couple of fairly trivial things. The Cambridge resolution was, “That lasting peace can only be secured by the people of England adopting an uncompromising attitude of pacifism.” Also, I’m pretty sure Merlins weren’t planes at the time; they were the engines used in the Spitfires.)

 

Now, I generally agree with Anderson that the pacifists were wrong in their categorical denunciation of using military force or fighting for king and country. But I have problems, too. World War I was an idiotic war. It took the lives of between 9 and 11 million people, roughly 10 percent of whom were British subjects, and wounded another 2 million British imperial combatants. Is it really shocking that the younger brothers of that whole generation might think ill of war? Might they not be forgiven for thinking the riot of nationalistic fervor was not worth what it bought? Is it so crazy that they should be skeptical of performative patriotic rhetoric?

 

We do something similar in this country. We play the movie backward, starting with Auschwitz and Treblinka or even Pearl Harbor, and think the isolationists who opposed war in the abstract had some moral ownership of an actual war in reality.  

 

My problem with the nationalists of the right, but also the soft socialists of the left, is that they think the crisis of meaning in America can be fixed wholesale. The nationalists talk as if the holes in the souls of millions of Americans can be filled up with a singular “American” identity. Some go much further and define American in racial terms, explicitly or with dog-whistle euphemisms like “heritage” or “European American.” The soft socialists prefer to talk about the government, not the nation, as the linchpin of meaning or “solidarity.” “Government is just another word for the things we do together,” as various Democrats liked to say in the Obama years. Sometimes they’ll use other terms, like “the people,” “the movement,” “our democracy,” or “social justice.” But the arguments are almost always the same.

 

Whatever the intentions—often very good, though not always—I think this is bulls–t of a very high order.

 

When serious people talk about a crisis of meaning, what they point to are serious problems of loneliness, alienation, and lack of purpose. I just recorded an episode of The Remnant with my AEI colleague Daniel Cox, the author of the new book Generation Uncoupled. The book brims with data about the problems facing young people. Huge numbers feel lonely and lost. “More than half of Americans report that no one knows them well,” Cox writes. “This feeling is even more pronounced among America’s youngest and most diverse generation—68 percent of Gen Z believe that no one really knows them.” The breakdown of the two-parent family drives a lot of this. “Young adults raised by unmarried parents who are not living together are twice as likely to report feeling that ‘there is nowhere you really belong.’” He continues: “Since 1990, the number of ‘close friends’ that Americans have has plummeted, especially among young adults. Nearly one in four young men and nearly one in five young women report having no close friends, an astonishing fact given that almost no respondents reported this when surveys questioned Americans about their social networks three decades earlier.” Derek Thompson recently wrote that the share of Americans hosting people for dinner has plummeted.  

 

Where is the empirical evidence that a renewed sense of national identity or passage of “Medicare for All” would address these problems? I get the intuition that says if we all saw ourselves as “real Americans,” we’d get along better. But I think that intuition is airy nonsense. Indeed, the people who talk about real Americans often strike me as the kinds of people looking for reasons to dislike or demonize other Americans.  

 

Or think of it this way. Do you think the students of Oxford and Cambridge were suffering from an epidemic of loneliness or lack of purpose? Maybe they didn’t want a replay of World War I because they had other plans for their lives? Maybe they wanted to get married and grow old with their wives and kids? Maybe they didn’t want to see roughly one out of three of their friends killed or maimed in service to national purpose?

 

The Israelis deployed in Gaza, at the Lebanese border, and in Syria who want to go home to their families and restart their careers want to get back to their normal lives, hopefully in a normal country. They want to find meaning watching their kids go to school, play soccer, get married, and have kids of their own.  

 

The problem with trying to solve America’s crisis of meaning from above is that this almost invariably involves proposing solutions that aren’t solutions, but rationales for electing politicians or spending money on programs. Their rhetoric is like a thin coat of paint splashed on millions of different people, families, communities, and institutions, thinking that if we just whitewash the problem, we’ll hide the problems.

 

The reason why war—real or metaphorical—is so seductive to politicians and planners is that it mobilizes Burke’s “little platoons” into battalions of shared meaning and purpose. That’s a necessary feature of war when war is necessary. But the necessity of war for a free society is to protect freedom, not to impose it on a free people. And meaning for a free people is found in those little platoons of faith, family, and friendship, as well as personal success in work or some other worthwhile endeavor. I think government can help make it easier to find that meaning. It can help communities build walkable neighborhoods near parks and good schools. It can make places safe. It can work to make family life more affordable. What it cannot do is deliver meaning to the people. Government can fortify our ability to pursue happiness, but it cannot provide it—because definitions of happiness are as diverse as the sources of it.

 

When a nation faces an existential crisis, those other sources of meaning recede for a larger purpose, and that can indeed be noble and uplifting. When a child falls down the village well, the villagers rally to rescue her. But that doesn’t mean we should want little girls to fall down wells. A crisis that isn’t temporary isn’t a crisis, it’s the status quo. And the professional peddlers of one-size-fits-all meaning need a permanent sense of crisis to secure a market for what they’re selling.

 

I think the students at Oxford and Cambridge supported a stupid proposition, but as Anderson concedes, their statements amounted to almost nothing when a real crisis presented itself. Because most healthy and happy people living decent and free lives will lay aside their individual pursuits of happiness for the greater good when doing so is necessary to deal with a crisis. But combating a crisis is not how we deliver free, healthy, happy, and decent lives—it’s how we protect them. Too many people get this backward, selling meaning in crisis rather than actually trying to fix the crisis of meaning—because the former is easy, and the latter is too damn hard.