As the nation grapples with the news that conservative activist and commentator Charlie Kirk was gunned down in cold blood while conducting one of his signature campus debates at Utah Valley University, it is of paramount importance for our political leaders both to recognize the political moment we are in and to try to defuse a potentially combustible situation. While conservatives will be tempted to demonize whoever the deluded shooter turns out to be, and liberals will undoubtedly call for more ineffective gun control legislation, neither reaction can hope to lead to anything productive.

Another tribute is in order to honor the memory of Kirk, who was one of the first to recognize that the radicalization of the left has been driven largely by economic disenfranchisement, a point that often goes unacknowledged by leading intellectual voices on the political right. There is a particular ideological bias that one notices in conservatives above a certain age (let’s say 45) who tend to dominate the positions of leadership in the right-leaning political organizations and think tanks now often referred to as “Conservative, Inc.” This bias is characterized by a certain disdain for the materialism and softness of young people who, having grown up in the wealthiest nation in the world with a prosperity unrivaled in human history, are simply unable to grasp the value of commitment, hard work, and the importance of moral virtue as the path to success in life. Spoiled, coddled, and ignorant of the struggles of previous generations, they feel like they are entitled to a prestigious position in the professional world and a valued social status without having to work to attain it. The problem is, according to this view, the collapse of a strong, coherent moral code and the older understanding that the sequence of success is one that demands self-denial and the deferment of gratification. These damn young people think the world owes them a living.

Kirk was uniquely clear-eyed in seeing this as not only a disastrous political analysis but also as a whitewash of the terrible policy choices that have caused so many Americans, particularly young people, to give up on the American Dream. While it is certainly true that the collapse of traditional Christian morality and the institutions that support it over the last 50 years has significantly eroded the stability of marriage, family, communities, and other mediating institutions that have historically served as bulwarks against tyranny, the Conservative Inc. caricature of Gen Z as rich, lazy, and entitled is hardly a complete—or fair—assessment of the political and social reality we face. The truth is that Gen Z, by a whole variety of measures, faces a much tougher socio-economic reality than any other American generation in memory. The decision to get married and form a family is not only negatively affected by the decline of the Christian ethic, but it is discouraged by an economy and a social structure that is no longer working for young people. The reality is that America, circa 2025, is not conducive to affordable family formation, and Gen Z is well aware of this. Even many of their parents are waking up to the fact that the American Dream of providing the next generation with greater prospects of professional achievement and material wealth than the last seems to be on life support.

The measures are all around us. College admission has become increasingly more competitive, and college itself is less affordable for the average American student. At the same time, the market value of a university degree and the guarantee of a lucrative career track based on that degree have steadily declined. The job market in the U.S. has changed drastically over the last four decades, with mass immigration pushing down wages and the outsourcing of production and labor abroad eliminating opportunities. Since 1981, the median age of homebuyers, the best measure of affordability and an ownership stake in the community, has gone from 31 to 56 today. The median age of first-time homebuyers has gone from 28 to 38 during the same time. Since the 1980s, stock market wealth has become increasingly concentrated among older Americans, and the percentage of young Americans with stock ownership has plummeted since the financial crisis of 2008. The recent public relations campaign of the World Economic Forum, selling the notion to young people in Western societies that “you will own nothing and be happy” because of all the efficiency and ease of a modern technological economy, seems to have been adopted wholesale by the American managerial elite responsible for creating the perverse incentives that have created and handed down a system characterized by degraded prospects of advancement and stability for people at the prime age of forming families.

We are seeing the rise of an entire generation of dispossessed Russian serfs in a rental economy full of technological toys and conveniences that distract them from the fact that they own nothing, and they live in a country where things are visibly degrading, in contrast to the hopeful, upwardly mobile economy of previous American generations. And this is where Conservative Inc. gets it drastically wrong. Our young people may be softer, more addicted to material comfort, and less able to do things for themselves than previous generations. It doesn’t mean they possess real wealth or any ownership stake in society whatsoever. It is largely a product of technological progress and an affluent society, with wealth increasingly concentrated at the top among the ownership elite who reap all the gains of economic growth. At the expense of the hollowed-out middle class.

Kirk argued that the more that the rising generation concludes that the current system is not working for them, the more prone they are to endorse radical, revolutionary, “tear down the system” political solutions that are purely destructive, including socialism and communism. Part of the appeal of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement is this same fundamental perception that the current system is not working and needs to be radically revamped. But unless we Make Family Formation Affordable Again, we are going to lose the political and policy argument, especially if we focus exclusively on moral decline as the root of the problem. It’s not what you would call a winning message to castigate the rising generation of voters as lazy, whiny, entitled brats who deserve their fate.

There can be no better tribute to Kirk—who literally gave his life attempting to reintegrate young people into the American system and to get Republicans to wake up to the dangers of radicalization if they failed to do so—than for President Trump and the GOP Congress to enact a Charlie Kirk Act for Affordable Family Formation. Republicans in Washington need to seize the moment so that some good can come of this horrific incident.

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Rob Wasinger is co-founder of The Ragnar Group. He was director of Senate relations for the Trump transition team in 2016 and the first White House liaison at the State Department during the Trump administration.