Holy Roman Empire USA

The Liberal-Left Establishment has never liked suburbia and exurbia, which are dismissed as "sprawl." And we know what the Liberal Left thinks of the Catholic Church. So what do you suppose Liberal Lefties think about a plan for a Catholic exurb? Talk about a bad twofer, in their eyes. Even worse, the new town of Ave Maria, Florida is being bankrolled by Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, the leading conservative Catholic philanthropist in the world. Yikes! No wonder it's so easy for the mainstream media to descend into name-calling -- The Times of London has mocked him as "the pizza pope," and it's likely to get worse in the future.

On the other hand, Monaghan is not without resources on his side. And by resources, I mean not only his own billion or so in wealth, much of which he has given away already. But the greater resource he has is the tradition of the Catholic Church, and its proven power, over two millennia, to create and sustain institutions. So while nobody can know the future of Ave Maria, the town, here's a prediction: It will be around longer than the Liberal-Left Establishment.

The Left's view of the 'burbs as a place of stifling bourgeois conformity is epitomized by the 1963 Malvina Reynolds folksong, "Little Boxes," which begins, "Little boxes on the hill side, little boxes made of ticky tacky." Little boxes? Ticky tacky? That's one view of the American Dream.

But of course, for the Left, suburbia just gets worse and worse. Consider these lines from a few bars later in the tune: "And the people in the houses all went to the university/Where they were put in boxes, little boxes, all the same./And there's doctors and there's lawyers, and there's business executives/And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same." The horror! People got educated, got good jobs, bought houses. To repeat, the horror!

The Left has never forgiven the American working class for becoming the American middle class. Through the middle of the last century, the Left had high hopes for the Masses; Lefties hoped that Proletarians, guided by a Revolutionary Vanguard (Stalinist or Trotskyist, there was division here) would build a good Soviet United States. But even before World War Two, instead of socialism and communism, Americans embraced capitalism, consumerism, and suburbanism. Whereas the Left wanted urban renters, who could be whipped up into rent strikes and other forms of urban protest, those darn American people preferred to become suburban owners; the folks in Levittown wanted to wage war on crabgrass, not their bosses.

And while the Catholic Church has never been a free-market outfit, it was nonetheless implacably hostile to "godless communism." As a result, the godless communists, and their somewhat more subdued-hued descendants, have been happy -- in return -- to spew venom on both suburbanites and Catholics. The old overt ideology is no longer visible, to be sure; the new style is a generalized contempt for the culture of Middle America.

Emblemizing this style is James Howard Kunstler, who trashes the idea of suburbia every chance he gets -- and he gets many, because his fellow Lefties buy hardcover. A fellow traveler in the same movement is Mike Davis, who has carved out a special niche for himself by predicting, for decades now, that Los Angeles would disappear in an eco-disaster. Instead, the median home price in Los Angeles County has hit an astonishing $560,000 -- surely something is going OK out there. But the failure of reality to conform to theory has not stopped Davis from enjoying a lucrative career of epater le bourgeoisie.

So at the elite level, these are the folks, and the mindset, that will greet the debut of Ave Maria. It's bad enough that Monaghan describes the town as "a new community of uncompromising quality and boundless opportunity" -- because the left knows that "quality" is a synonym for "standards." Strike One. And "opportunity," in the Left rulebook, is an antonym for "equality." Strike Two. And of course, Monaghan is pro-life, and that's Strikes Three to Three Hundred.

So then it came: the Left's effort to eject Monaghan and his mini-metropolis right outta de game.

An article on the Lefty website workingforchange.com tossed around the obligatory buzzwords, such as "ultraconservative," before warning that Monaghan's charitable ventures "appear to be walking a thin line between conservative organization and radical cult."

More mainstream-y publications were a bit less inflammatory, while still making their anti-Ave feelings apparent. Newsweek's understated hostility toward Ave Maria began with its headline, "Halfway to Heaven." For those not familiar with Newsweek's worldview, trust me -- the magazine intended that as an ironic joke. Reacting to reports that Monaghan might seek to prevent pharmacies in his new town from carrying contraceptives, the magazine echoed the tone of the American Civil Liberties Union, which declared itself to be "worried." Happily, according to the mag, ACLU Florida executive director Howard Simon "will be watching Ave Maria for any signs of Monaghan's requests becoming a demand." And lest any reader be too thick to see the gravity of the situation, Newsweek added, "Planned Parenthood is similarly alarmed."

A subsequent AP story was even more explicit in expressing Liberal-Left fear: Ave Maria would offer "no place to get an abortion, pornography or birth control." And the same Howard Simon was quoted again, this time more threateningly toward Monaghan & Co.: "If they attempt to do what he apparently wants to do, the people of Naples and Collier County, Florida, are in for a whole series of legal and constitutional problems and a lot of litigation indefinitely into the future."

Such attempted legal bullying led Human Events columnist Mac Johnson to snap, "What do you bet this town will have low crime, high test scores, good neighbors, a healthy rate of reproduction, and be sued every day that it exists by the ACLU?"

Just a few years ago, given the correlation of forces -- people on one side, liberal litigators on the other -- one would have had to bet on the liberal litigators. But the judiciary has changed and continues to change, such that the Right is now winning victories, not just at the ballot box, but also in the courts. So it's possible, just possible, that the ACLU won't be able to clobber Ave Maria.

Meanwhile, deep trendlines bode well for Ave Maria. Most obviously, the long wave of suburbanization has been flowing for a century now. The Left derides it as "sprawl," others call it simply, "growth." As city historian Joel Kotkin explains, the "new urbanist" vision of densely bohemian neighborhoods may entrance the Left, but ordinary people want blue sky and a yard. And oh yes, they want safety and affordability. Which is to say, sprawl. And so while avant-garde critics celebrate the "renaissance" of funky 'hoods from Brooklyn to "LoDo" in Denver to Santa Monica, the big growth is in such unglamorous places as Rockland County, NY, Scott County, MN, and San Bernardino County, CA.

And yes, there's a partisan political angle here, too, since 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the US gave their votes to George W. Bush in 2004. So now comes Monaghan, building his new town in a county that went 2:1 for W. From a Lefty point-of-view, is there anything right about this picture? Short answer, no. And ditto the long answer.

But in fact, not all of these new places are conservative. Columbia, MD, for example, was developed by liberal visionary James Rouse as a new town that would be both economically and ethnically integrated. And booming Las Vegas is a Democratic bastion in Nevada. And who can guess about the future politics of Martha Stewart's new development in North Carolina, or Robert Congel's proposed Destiny USA in upstate New York? Indeed, as the Dallas-based Rod Dreher has written, the Right has absorbed many of the values of the counter-culture; just about anywhere one goes in the US, one sees evidence of a cultural "greening" -- organic food stores, yoga workshops, New Age worship sites. And yet in many cases, "green" votes "red," not "blue."

The problem with all these places, in the view of the Left, is that they exist far away from the influence of the big cities, with their deep ideo-infrastructure of universities, institutes, newspapers, and other Lefty-content-providers. This is to say, people will be free to experiment, i.e. to try new things, outside of the Left's tutelage.

Meanwhile, techno-trends with which TCS-ers are familiar -- telecommuting, distance learning, electronic piecework -- are easing the dispersal of the population. And if the promise of nanotechnology comes true, and we all have little factories in our homes, then it will be even easier for us to live just about anywhere, far from the once-needed grid.

But wait, there's more -- more centrifugal trends. Please answer this question as honestly as you can: What are the chances of a weapon of mass destruction, from any source, hitting a big city in the US? The WMD doesn't have to come from Al-Qaeda; it could be some other foreign power, or some creepy kid with a chemistry set. If your answer is that the odds of such a WMDisaster are pretty good, then yet another argument for exurbanization presents itself.

Here's where the Catholics can say, "We've seen this before -- and we had a pretty good response." Back in the sixth century, after the fall of the Roman Empire, one Italian, Benedict of Nursia, didn't just bemoan the collapse of the world around him, he did something about it. He created a world of his own: the monastery at Monte Cassino. In honor of his vision, he is known to us now as St. Benedict the Great, the father of Christian monasticism. For hundreds of years thereafter, through the darkest of the Dark Ages, monasteries were the chief custodians of Western Civilization, until more traditional political authorities had restored some semblance of law, order, and prosperity, thus permitting cities to flourish once again. Is this particular epoch of history due for a repeat? Let's hope not, but let's hope that some people, at least, have a plan for surviving even the worst calamity. In the meantime, it's interesting that the new Pope has chosen the name Benedict -- one wonders what he knows.

But whereas the Old Monasticism of the Catholic Church was ascetic, the Next Monasticism need not be ascetic; indeed, there's good reason to hope that it isn't. The world has plenty of childless people -- and what the West needs, in particular, are young people.

Most likely, the world will muddle through the next few centuries without a plunge into a New Dark Age. But in a world full of evil, and full of technology that can be used for evil, it can't hurt to have a few places such as Ave Maria in reserve -- just in case.

And in the meantime, Ave Maria offers all of us a great gift: the power of an alternative. Not everyone wants to be a conservative Catholic, but those that do should have a place of their own. That's the truest kind of diversity, the right to think and believe and behave differently, be it in the name of God, or of no god.

And it's worth celebrating, now and forever.