Joe is thirty-two. He does creative design work that pays ok. He voted for President Trump in 2024 the way a lot of guys his age did — because he wanted the country to stop managing decline and start making it possible to build something again.
He grew up on Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck in the car, Ben Shapiro destroying college kids on YouTube, and Louder with Crowder skits. For decades, the conservative movement told him that America had drifted from the principles that once made the good life possible. He believed them. He still does.
But something doesn’t add up.
When Joe tries to do the most ordinary thing a man can do — find a modest place to live near work, near family, for something less than half his paycheck — there’s no slot in his political worldview for why it’s impossible. Nobody told him that housing is the cleanest example of the big government that his movement hates.
The voices he grew up on talked about taxes. They talked about federal overreach. When they talked about housing at all, they talked about it like weather — something that just happens. Or rather as something that would sort itself out once the broader economy got healthy. They almost never told Joe that a board of appointed strangers in his own town decides what can be built on a given acre of land, and therefore what he is allowed to afford.
My point is that I listened to him for years before the podcast got big, and I don’t think Glenn Beck ever said “land use regulations” when talking about the Marxisifcation of America.
That silence was convenient for conservative inc. It just wasn’t convenient for Joe.
The reason I suspect this is that single-family zoning has long been seen as a political third rail of the people who traditionally listen to those voices on cable news, and somehow, despite having a younger audience, it has never made it into the mainstream of online conservative inc.
For cable news and radio, telling middle-class homeowners that the rules protecting their property values were quietly pricing out their own kids — that’s a hard thing to read into a microphone. So the movement reached for fights that felt cleaner. It explained the radicalization of the young as Marxist indoctrination in the universities, in Hollywood, and in the press. All real. All worth fighting for sure. But it almost never connected radicalization to the plain fact that those same young people can’t afford rent even if they are hard working.
Call it audience capture. The Fox News audience liked this form of progressivism. So this form got a pass.
I know this because I was Joe. I suspect a lot of you were, too.
For good reasons, we spent thirty years terrified of a bureaucrat standing between you and your doctor. We fought Hillarycare in the nineties and Obamacare in 2010. We warned about death panels, about faceless boards rationing care, about experts in an office deciding what you were allowed to have. We were right to fight it. A committee should never stand between a man and the care he needs.
A committee has been standing between Joe and a home his entire life. Making it artificially scarce by law — and now the bill is due. And hardly anybody on our side said a word.
That is the asymmetry. We taught a generation to oppose government-run healthcare and government-owned housing. We taught them to hate rent control, correctly. But minimum lot sizes? Setback rules? The discretionary veto of a local planning board? We acted like those weren’t even part of the same family of ideas. They are. They are the purest version of it — a panel of experts substituting its judgment for yours, on land you own, in the most personal decision you will ever make.
That has been the battle since the progressives won in the counter-revolution of the managers between the 1910s-30’s. Over that era of ideological groupthink, everything became a “freedom” such as in FDRs 4 freedoms, or they became “human right”. An abuse of both terms, but you know what I’m talking about. They went after every critical domain of human survival to better plan it with experts and we’ve been fighting them off from every angle.
In Food. Progressives tried their regime and had early political success, but it failed so spectacularly it was abolished. In the New Deal’s farm program paid farmers to grow less, and where they wouldn’t, it plowed crops under and slaughtered millions of hogs to drive prices up. County committees decided how much you were allowed to plant. They called it, “adjustment”. It was artificial scarcity, engineered on purpose, while people stood in bread lines, which is one of the many reasons FDR made the depression worse, despite what many history books say. And in 1936 the Supreme Court struck the whole scheme down. The planning board over agriculture lasted three years. What came back afterward was a subsidy check, but not a committee with a veto over which crops and how many.
Interestingly, a decade before the Court found the Constitutional backbone to strike the takeover of agriculture by the FDR administration, it had already endorsed one for all land use with buildings— and walked away whistling. In 1926, Euclid versus Ambler. A village zoned a company’s property into near-worthlessness. The company sued. And the same Court would codify the right to overrule the landowner nearly everywhere if it didn’t meet the experts plans.
In Water it’s a more positive story, the states largely held the line. They fought federal control over who owns water and who gets it, and they mostly kept it — right up through the fight over Obama’s Waters of the United States rule, when Washington tried to stretch its reach into the puddles on a man’s own property and got beaten back. The core argument against it was that it violated our ancient customs regarding property and water rights and would likely have terrible effects.
With healthcare, they got furthest, maybe short of housing. We let in third-party payment and a wall of regulation that drove costs up and competition down. Certificate-of-need laws in many states still empower a state board to tell a doctor he may not open a clinic, add a hospital bed or buy a machine because a competitor might be inconvenienced. That is a board between you and your care, and it is real. But even there — even there — we’ve been at least fighting it.
In the end, land use has been the most complete takeover by the progressives of any institution in America but monetary policy. Mostly because Conservatives largely let them off the hook and never took up the fight.
So we got exactly what you would expect when you give technocratic experts that kind of power over land. Across most of this country, it is now flatly illegal to build starter homes and small apartment buildings that once let a young person get a foot on the ladder.
Here is the hard truth for our side. We have been telling ourselves we are the keepers of limited government and property rights while operating inside institutions built on the opposite premise — that experts and boards should overrule owners and builders and the people who actually live somewhere. We got good at slowing the next expansion, pushing on the brake while the left has the pedal to the metal.
But the longstanding trope remains true because of this defensive posture, conservatives don’t really advance much in terms of their own ideas and when they do, their politicians are rarely radical enough to get much at the bargaining table – see the failure to get the REINS or SAVE Act. I suspect that is mostly due to the avoidance of the hard reality: we don’t live under Madison’s Constitution, we live under FDRs. And rather than confront that, conservatives are just saying, “slow down”, rather than “turn right”.
We have been playing on their board. Their rules. Their squares. And then we wonder why we keep losing ground.
You can win elections on their board. You can stall the next bad bill. But the default stays the one the planners drew. You are losing slowly and calling it conservation.
I don’t intend to lose slowly.
So picture the other version. The one where Joe can buy that starter home where he lives where he works, or 10 minutes from his parents, so the kiddos can see Papa and Mumu more often.
That doesn’t happen just because Joe gets a raise or pays less taxes, though that’d be sweet. It happens because inflation isn’t out of control, because the builder in his city put up those six modest homes with plans that flew through the process. His town isn’t flooded with illegal immigrants, and the labor costs are reasonable because tradesmen are not given the government protections from competition that prohibits price competition.
That is not a fantasy. I know that it is possible because it is America, prior to the progressive era, not perfect, but American and defined by freedom.
That is what Build the Dream is about. A center-right that stops pretending we are one tax cut away from prosperity and starts naming the machine that is actually in the way of our prosperity.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.
By a story we accepted instead of correcting, and a permission system we never had the nerve to name. We can tell a different story — one that treats the freedom to build as part of the inheritance worth fighting to restore.
Housing is where that story starts. And Joe is still young enough to live in the better ending and pass something better on to his kids.
