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The Left’s war on home ownership, the suburbs and the American Dream intensifies.
Around 90 A.D., the Roman historian Tacitus traveled through Germania observing the lives of its inhabitants. It was quite an eye-opening journey for him. Among his many observations, he noted how the Germanic people chose to live in small separate dwellings, separate from even extended family. Often these dwellings would house just a mother, father, and their children. That seems normal to us today, but it certainly wasn’t to Tacitus and the Romans, or much of the civilized world at that time.
Authors Michael Lotus and James Bennett wrote of this in their groundbreaking book “America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come.” The Germanic tribes would take this radical cultural trait with them, when in the 5th Century A.D. they would conquer Britannia. In fact, the German tribe of Angles would give England its future name. While this cultural trait would not remain as powerful in Germania or in much of Europe, it would further migrate, most notably to America, Canada, and Australia. The idea of owning a single-family home is not unknown to the world, of course, but it planted its deepest cultural seeds here in the United States. The epitome of the American Dream is to own one’s home – a home is a man’s castle.
Why the history lesson? Because the yearning to own one’s own home is under threat and the ability to buy and own a piece of land in America is under intense attack from the Left. But then what isn’t under attack from the Left. Our communities, families, churches, every aspect of middle-class lifestyle is seen as an obstacle to the Left’s utopian dream of a new society, a roadblock in the efforts to radically transform society.
The Left is now pushing policies that promote a “densification” of living. These new “smart cities” include dense living in small, cramped dwellings in cities where the need and use of a car are eliminated. The question of what people may want becomes irrelevant. That some younger people choose to live in dense living arrangements in cities is often true. But most younger people, when they marry and have families, choose to live outside of dense cities; they vote with their feet and choose to live in suburbs…
