In 1993, Wendell Berry wrote an essay, “A Bad Big Idea,” sharply opposing the “free trade” proposal of the day, which he correctly feared would be backed by the Clinton Administration.
Berry farms in his native Kentucky, and writes novels, poetry, and essays. Large among his animating concerns is preserving the culture of the agrarian world into which he was born and which he sees as being hounded into oblivion by those who care little for the land or the people who work it. He does not substitute a narrow political affiliation for his real concerns, and he has incisive criticism for all sides of our politics: of liberals for their illiberality and of conservatives for their failing to conserve that which is of deepest value.
Despotism does not have to proceed at the beginning by force. It offers us cheap services, sells us a vision that it tells us has no cost.
This essay from 32 years ago is remarkably relevant to the concerns gripping so many today. It is hard to think of two personalities more disparate than Berry and Donald Trump, but there is no doubt that their concerns overlap. The jumble and chaos of democratic life and its free and tumultuous debate of ideas can result in unexpected confluences. It’s one of our strengths.
Berry addresses the proposals of his day affecting agriculture:
Though [these proposals] would deny to the people of some 108 nations any choice in the manner of protecting their land, their farmers, their food supply, or their health, these proposals were not drafted, and if adopted, would not be implemented by anybody elected by the people of any of the 108 nations. Their purpose is to bypass all local, state, and national governments in order to subordinate the interests of those governments and of the peoples they represent to the interests of a global “free market”…
The issue here really is not whether international trade shall be free but whether or not it makes sense for a country—or, for that matter, a region—to destroy its own capacity to produce its own food.
In recent years, Victor Davis Hanson has often mused about how the opening up of trade in the almonds and raisins that his family had raised for many decades in California doomed their way of life. Imports suddenly flooded the market in huge quantities at prices that no one could match. Rapidly, farmers sold or rented their lands to large scale corporate producers, as they could no longer make a living. Hanson himself gave up on his farming to concentrate fully on his intellectual endeavors, by which I and so many others have profited.
Yet it is clear he feels the loss of a way of life that had more common sense about it than seems present in almost any university. It is no doubt the virtues demanded by farm life inform his writing, as they do for Berry. It attunes him to others whose role in life is similarly disdained by their would-be rulers, who would exclude them once and for all from political power.
Common sense is what Thomas Paine proposed as that which would free us from the presumptions of a distant upper class to rule the lives of their colonized subjects. Berry is aware of this idea and alludes to it deliberately. He speaks of the proponents of the trade agreement revisions as having
forced us to realize that [they] may be able to set the standards for governments but that it cannot set the standards for individuals and local communities—unless those individuals and local communities allow it to do so. They have, in other words, made certain truths self-evident.
Here is the deep connection between economy and politics. One can neither feed oneself nor protect our beloved communities with the abstractions and models the credentialed class sells us. The specialized knowledge of experts is useless unless held up by everyday, local competencies of everyday people. Political theories that do not speak concretely to the heart of the people and governments that treat the affection of their citizens as unimportant will rationalize their way into tyranny. Dismissing the uncredentialed class as inconsequential, they find their concerns frustrating and will increasingly resort to force to control them. They look constantly to remove agency from all but themselves.
To that, the Founders and those who still value their work pose the power of self-evident truths.
Berry asks:
How can a government, entrusted with the health and safety of its citizens, conscientiously barter away in the name of an economic idea that people’s ability to feed itself? And if people lose their ability to feed themselves, how can they be said to be free?
In 1993, there was no hint that China would be welcomed into the world market. The specter of Tiananmen Square had made obvious the character of that regime, ending the long honeymoon in which imagined in the end that the Communists of China would follow the Communists of the Soviet bloc into peaceful retirement, and we would all live in a world at last entirely peaceful and free. Yet Berry had made his point that the logic of the globalists put them on the side of those who don’t want freedom for those who disagree with their plans.
Berry Knew the Importance of the Local
Berry was saying that we were heading in the Communists’ direction, rather than the other way around. The ones who were gradually and quietly retired were those who wished to keep economies meaningfully local, and have the changes required to negotiate a changing world still made in large part locally.
Today, we are asking Berry’s questions about many realms of endeavor other than farming. During the great COVID crisis, our would-be economic masters rubbed in our helplessness, slow-walking the supply of masks and medications that we had outsourced to get the low prices provided by the labor of enslaved Uyghurs and Cantonese sweatshops. Under the spell of the myth that enriching the Communist regime would turn it freedom-loving, we have left ourselves vulnerable in many other vital areas. Our assumptions are being proven fatuous by Chairman Xi, whose use of technology to completely control his billion subjects has proven Churchill prophetic once again:
Explosive forces, energy, materials, machinery will be available upon a scale which can annihilate whole nations. Despotism and tyrannies will be able to prescribe the lives and even the wishes of their subjects in a manner never known since time began.
Despotism does not have to proceed at the beginning by force. It offers us cheap services, sells us a vision that it tells us has no cost, and it insinuates itself into the structure we built carefully so that no government would ever again usurp the sovereignty of its citizens.
But in the Deep State, the ever-expanding administrative branch’s baby, it has carefully tightened its grip and removed as much choice as possible from the hands of everyone except itself. It tells us now that without its authority, not only will we be denied the cheap and shiny things to which we are addicted, but our economy will lie in ruins, and we will be hated and vulnerable.
Berry’s essay saw where this was going some time ago. When we turn from the promises and abstractions peddled by the globalists back to the self-evident truths and common sense of our daily lives, we come back once more into our founding freedom. It is only when we build on the actual ground beneath our feet that our structures of thought and organization can be strong and lasting. Only upon local communities that are truly free can any larger organization of our world be built that will guard and protect our liberties.
This is the founding American vision. Its truth commands our hearts and souls to its effective support.
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