Homeground USA

Wendell Berry has been claimed by liberals, environmentalists, conservatives, and agriculture. What does he say about himself?
“Republicans who read this book should beware either of approving it as “conservative” or dismissing it as “liberal.” Democrats should beware of the opposite errors.
One reason is that I am an agrarian. I think that good farming is a high and difficult art, that it is indispensable, and that it cannot be accomplished except under certain conditions. Manifestly, good farming cannot be fostered or maintained under the rule of the presently dominant economic assumptions of our political parties.
Another reason is that I am a member, by choice, of a local community. I believe that healthy communities are indispensable, and I know that our communities are disintegrating under the influence of economic assumptions that are accepted without question by both our parties- despite their lip service to various noneconomic “values.”
The “conservatives” believe that an economy that favors its richest and most powerful participants will somehow serve the best interest of everybody. the “liberals” believe just as irrationally that a merely competitive economy, growing always on a larger scale and controlled by fewer and fewer people, can be corrected by extending government charity to the inevitable victims: the disposessed, the unrepresented, and the unemployed. No agrarian or community member could look kindly upon or wish to serve either belief.
A reader would also be in error who concluded, from this book’s reiterated wish to restore local life by means of local economies, that it is “antigovernment.” On the contrary, one of the fundamental purposes of these essays is to serve the cause of democratic government as established by the Constitution. I do not believe, however, that a nation can secure a government merely by means of a constitution. Political democracy can endure only as the guardian of economic democracy, as I am by no means the first to say. A democratic government fails in failing to protect the integrity of ordinary lives and local communities. By now it should be pretty obvious that central planning is of a piece with absentee ownership and does not work. But to say as much does not say that there is no proper role for government. The proper role of government is to protect its citizens and its communities against conquest- against economic conquest just as much as conquest by overt violence.
Underlying all I have written here is the assumption that a people who are entirely lacking in economic self-determination….cannot be governed democratically- or not for long. This seems to be borne out by the present decline of political dialogue into a rhetoric of increasingly violent abstraction, without compassion, imagination, manners, or goodwill.”
This is from the foreword of “Another Turn of the Crank,” by Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1995).
I like to quote some of Berry’s ideas on political polarization and his agrarian ideas, because it supports Henry Bamford Parkes’ notion of the harm being done by our educators and press by trying to put everything into the industrial European model- that every issue is a fierce battle between a “left wing” and a “right wing,” between conservative capitalists and liberal socialists. This is the land-based, decentralist tradition. They aren’t proposing a center between these two, but a bigger picture than this- yet made up of smaller concentrations of power- the small farm, the small shop, the local economy and local community, the local land base- a decentralization and democratization of power.