The Politics of Identity Crisis
Charlie Kirk is no longer among us. He was shot, and with his death, a voice was silenced. I was never his follower—his Christianity, his Biblical worldview, his style were not mine. My sympathies lie more with Homer than with the Bible, with philosophy rather than with theology. Yet I recognized something in him: he stood on a line. His opinions might be contested, even rejected, but they were political opinions—clear, bounded, rooted.
What struck me more than Kirk himself were his interlocutors. So many of them did not seem to come to him with politics at all, but with something more fragile: a fractured sense of self. Their arguments bled out of them not as reasoned stances but as cries of instability, identity crises that spilled into every corner of life—into their work, their bodies, their language, even their anger.
This is the difference. A political stance, however wrong, remains political: it argues, it proposes, it seeks to persuade. A psychological wound disguised as politics cannot stop at that boundary. It demands recognition everywhere, turning every disagreement into an existential threat. That is why so many “debates” today collapse into theater: one side speaks in ideas, the other screams from pain.
But here lies the real question: where did this come from? Twenty years ago, such extreme identity politics barely existed. It is not born from nowhere. It is born from our society itself. These people grew up in the age of social media, of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok—the endless hall of mirrors. And what does that mirror reflect? Nothing stable. No family bonds, no civic rituals, no common story. Only fragments, likes, performance.
Durkheim had a word for this: anomie. A condition where norms collapse, where society no longer gives individuals a framework to orient themselves, where the compass spins endlessly. In anomie, people grasp for identity anywhere they can find it, and cling to it with desperation. That is what we see today, in its most extreme form.
Kirk, whatever one thinks of him, did not radiate anomie. He radiated belief, conviction. That is why he seemed whole, even if you disagreed with him. His interlocutors radiated fracture. And that is why these conflicts feel less like politics and more like the pathology of our times.