Wendell Berry’s Politics of Coming Home

When I got the news last night that Wendell Berry had died, I was on my front porch with my dogs and my daughters. We had been inspecting a large brown toad who was wandering among the stones in the front yard.

Toads spend the summer feasting, fattening themselves for the long winter they will spend burrowed beneath the frost line. Spiders, slugs, worms, and insects are digested into vital stores of fat. By the time September arrives, the summer’s work is visible. This particular toad was so large that my smaller dog, a miniature Goldendoodle, refused to approach it. My daughter Rose laughed and pointed out how amazing it was that humans had bred wolves into fluffy fearers of amphibians.

“You were kings of the forest and the prairie once,” she told the doodle. “We did this to you, out of love.”

Our talk of nature and our role in it was interrupted by the arrival of a text message bearing a link to an obituary. It was for the poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, protectionist, and immigration restrictionist Wendell Berry. He had died at 92 in his Kentucky.

I put my phone away. I did not need to read an obituary of Berry because I have been reading his work since I was a teenager. And I am still not so fully domesticated by technology that I was willing to let it pull me away from the toad, the dogs, the porch, and my daughters on the last night of August. There would be time for Berry after the dogs and the girls had gone to bed.

President Trump is not the sort of political leader who goes in for poets laureate. But if the movement to make America great again had one, it would be Wendell Berry, the sage of Port Royal, Kentucky.

What Are People For?

When I got around to reading the obituaries, I was not surprised to find that the figure they were memorializing was a shadow of the real man.

The New York Times called Berry a writer who “extolled America’s agrarian past.” The Associated Press called him an advocate of “a simpler life.” Berry in these accounts becomes a dusty portrait, almost like a reenactment actor you might encounter on a family trip to “Colonial” Williamsburg.  An argument about the future of the American republic becomes a fond remembrance of draft horses, organic vegetables, and pencil-written poems.

But the Berry I read—the man who wrote to his fellow Americans for decades from his home in Kentucky—did not devote his life to making the past picturesque. He asked how a people might have a future worth inhabiting.

Neither obituary tells the reader that Berry defended tariffs, accepted the name protectionist, and opposed the global trade regime built through NAFTA, GATT, and the World Trade Organization. Neither tells the reader that he defended immigration limits and criticized the businesses that sought to exploit our lax border policies. Neither places his localism within the American conservative tradition that runs through the Southern Agrarians, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, the writers and institutions of the traditionalist right, through Pat Buchanan, and right on to the presidency of Donald Trump and the vice presidency of JD Vance.

The worst thing about these omissions is that these things—tariffs and immigration restriction—were not peripheral to who Berry was as a writer. They grew directly from the fertile soil of his moral vision. He saw us as not merely consumers, workers, taxpayers, or voters. We are members of a marriage and a household, of a neighborhood and a place, of a history and a country, and ultimately of Creation. Each membership bestows gifts and imposes duties. A good economy helps us perform those duties while a corrupted economy pays us to abandon them.

I was reminded of a pair of scenes from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The Pevensie children are in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Beaver and learning about Aslan for the first time. Susan is surprised to learn Aslan is a lion:

“Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…
“Safe?” said Mr Beaver. “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

Much later, after Aslan slips away before the coronation festivities, Mr. Beaver explains his departure. “He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.”

The obituarists painted a picture of a false Berry, one stripped of all the views they find difficult to reconcile with the admiration they know they should feel for him. The real Wendell Berry was not a tame writer.

The Country Inside the Country

Membership is key to understanding Berry’s view of the good life. In his book What Are People For?, Berry argues that consumerism teaches us to meet the world as appetite: What can I get, how cheaply, with how little obligation? Membership asks what is mine to love, maintain, and pass on. It asks us to take responsibility for the changes we bring to our communities, our country, and our fellow inhabitants of these places. For Berry, globalism is consumerism enlarged to the scale of the earth, turning every place into a supplier, every person into an input or a customer, and every inheritance into an asset awaiting liquidation.

The spiritual core of economic nationalism—which is the very heart of the movement to Make America Great Again—is the defense of membership against a political, economic, and social machinery that wants every person to be replaceable and every place to be for sale.

I can almost hear the folks who prostrate themselves to the tame shadow Berry scoffing at the idea that he could be described as a nationalist of any sort. Wasn’t he the most local of localists? How could he be a nationalist and a localist?

The question betrays a misunderstanding of both local community and the nation. While Berry’s localism began at home, it did not end at the property line. His loyalties were nested: household, neighborhood, Port Royal, Kentucky, America. The larger membership has obligations to defend the smaller ones, while the smaller memberships give the country its substance. A nation is not made less national by loving its particular places. Quite the opposite. Those places are the nation. The truest nationalism is localism—and the only viable localism requires nationalism.

A town council cannot impose a tariff on dumped steel. A county cannot renegotiate or resist the rules of the World Trade Organization. A congregation cannot police a national border. A family cannot prevent a multinational corporation from moving a factory to China and importing its products back into the United States. Detroit cannot defend itself against Canada’s attempts to tranship Chinese-manufactured components. The forces that seek to unmake local life and attack the jobs where we live frequently operate at a scale beyond the local community’s power to resist. National sovereignty gives those communities a common means of defense.

The national interest is the shared defense of particular interests that deserve to endure. The first step in national defense must be the defense of the capacity of the particular places where we live to remain economically productive and recognizably their own. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reminds us today, economic security is national security.

Berry made the point in an essay with a title the obituary writers might have found instructive: “Property, Patriotism, and National Defense”:

[We] must ask first what kind of country is defensible, militarily or in any other way. And we may answer that a defensible country has a large measure of practical and material independence: that it can live, if it has to, independent of foreign supplies and of long-distance transport within its own boundaries; that it rests upon the broadest possible base of economic prosperity, not just in the sense of a money economy, but in the sense of properties, materials, and practical skills; and, most important of all, that it is generally loved and competently cared for by its people, who, individually, identify their own interest with the interest of their neighbors and of the land itself.

He made it again after September 11 in “The Failure of War.” A serious national defense, he argued, begins with national and regional economic independence—the ability of a people to live from their own resources and from their own work and skills:

It seems only reasonable, only sane, to suppose that a gigantic program of preparedness for national defense should be founded first of all upon a principle of national and even regional economic independence. A nation determined to defend itself and its freedoms should be prepared, and always preparing, to live from its own resources and from the work and the skills of its own people. But that is not what we are doing in the United States today. What we are doing is squandering in the most prodigal manner the natural and human resources of the nation.

The self-styled free-traders always insist that tariffs and protectionism lead to war, and globalization to peace—even though everyone who can remember the history of the last century or even the last millennium knows that this is false. The corpses of those killed in wars between international trading nations are uncountable. Sometimes I think the boldness of the lie is the point: if they can get you to believe it, they know that you are tame. Berry knew that the economy the free-traders built was “warlike.”

Embracing the Devil Term: Protectionism

In the early 1990s, when the leadership of both parties treated global free trade as an historical inevitability and a boon to all, Berry treated it as a choice made by powerful people and imposed on less powerful places. His essay “A Bad Big Idea” answered the proposed Uruguay Round revisions to GATT and appeared in The Case Against “Free Trade”: GATT, NAFTA, and the Globalization of Corporate Power. Elsewhere he pointedly asked: “How can any nation or region justify the destruction of a local productive capacity for the sake of foreign trade?”

In “The Idea of a Local Economy,” Berry defended the right of governments to impose tariffs on cheap imports to protect domestic producers and productive capacity:

When state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people’s products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations: communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to “grow” by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world…

Aware of industrialism’s potential for destruction, as well as the considerable political danger of great concentrations of wealth and power in industrial corporations, American leaders developed, and for a while used, the means of limiting and restraining such concentrations, and of somewhat equitable distributing wealth and property. The means were: laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining, the concept of one-hundred-percent parity between the land-using and the manufacturing economies, and the progressive income tax. And to protect domestic producers and production capacities it is possible for governments to impose tariffs on cheap imported goods. These means are justified by the government’s obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its citizens. There is, then, no necessity or inevitability requiring our government to sacrifice the livelihoods or our small farmers, small business people, and workers, along with our domestic economic independence to the global “free market.”

He even went so far as to embrace the devil term protectionism:

The principles of neighborhood and subsistence will be disparaged by the globalists as “protectionism”—and that is exactly what it is. It is a protectionism that is just and sound, because it protects local producers and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local consumers. And the idea that local needs should be met first and only surpluses exported does not imply any prejudice against charity toward people in other places or trade with them. The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. And the principle of subsistence is in fact the best guarantee of giveable or marketable surpluses. This kind of protection is not “isolationism.”

This is the argument for tariffs that Pat Buchanan carried into presidential politics and that Donald Trump made the center of the Republican Party’s economic program.

Note that Berry’s protectionism began with two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. Neighbors should ask what they can provide for one another. A viable community should retain the ability to produce what it needs, meet local needs first, and trade from its surplus. The same principle, he explicitly said, applies to localities, regions, and nations.

“Good fences make goods neighbors,” another rooted poet once wrote, with far less irony than is typically supposed. A farm has fences because husbandry requires boundaries: pasture from road, crop from grazing animal, one responsibility from another. A tariff draws a boundary around a people’s productive inheritance. It tells the domestic producer that his country values the continued existence of his work. It tells the corporation that the cheapest labor in the world will not automatically determine where Americans make the things Americans need. It tells the trading partner eyeing our markets that our shared prosperity is something we will defend jealously.

Berry saw that the global economy converts the freedom of corporations to move into an obligation for everyone else to move. When the factory goes abroad, the worker must leave town. The young are told—even by some self-styled conservatives—that ambition requires exile. The migrant crosses a border to perform work for wages that cannot sustain the native worker. Families scatter or are never formed at all.  Communities lose their economic reason for being, marriages are delayed, children become scarce resources, despair leads to dependency and early death.

Sadly, around ten years ago, there were self-styled conservatives celebrating this. Go rent a U-Haul. There’s nothing wrong with the economy. Nothing has happened to you or your hometown that could not be fixed by uprooting yourself. Becoming a refugee in your homeland was your patriotic duty.

The economic nationalism of Wendell Berry says the books must be kept honestly. We cannot just count the sales of products on the shelves of those arriving in shipping containers. We must also keep the other side of the ledger. A closed mill is a cost. A lost skill is a cost. Dependence on a hostile country is a cost. The destruction of a community is a cost. The contraction of families is a cost.

The Limits of Immigration

Berry approached immigration through the same moral arithmetic: membership, limits, work, and the ability of a place to bear what is asked of it.

In his 1985 essay “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey,” Berry defended the novelist and essayist against critics who denounced his proposal to close the Mexican border to immigration. “Stop every campesino at our southern border, give him a handgun, a good rifle, and a case of ammunition, and send him home. He will know what to do with our gifts and good wishes,” Abbey wrote.

Berry called Mexican immigration a “ruthless paradox.” Mexicans were drawn north by the extravagance of the American way of life, he wrote, while that same extravagance destroyed the material and cultural conditions of durable generosity. Then came the sentence at the heart of any serious immigration policy: “Before talking about generosity, we must talk about carrying capacity.”

Like membership, carrying capacity was one of Berry’s governing ideas. A farmer who ignores the carrying capacity of his land can boast of record production while damaging the soil that makes future production possible. A dairyman who keeps too many cows can complete every assigned task and cease to see the cows. Scale passes beyond the reach of attention.

The principle applies to communities. Immigration is legislated nationally, but it is lived locally. Migrants become workers in a labor market, children in a classroom, patients in a hospital, tenants in a housing market, parishioners in a church, and neighbors on a street. The receiving place performs the work of absorption. Its capacity is measured in wages and houses, but also in attention, trust, custom, language, memory, and the practical reach of neighborliness.

Berry also understood the employer’s appetite for uprooted labor. In a 2019 interview with The New Yorker, he said migrant farmworkers arrive as strangers and are exploited. Once a society accepts that a person is exploitable, he observed, exploitation proceeds outward. It is not just the migrant who is exploited but the workers he displaces or even those whose work he supposedly complements.

Immigration must be governed by carrying capacity as much as any farm’s production, and the people admitted must be received as prospective members rather than maintained as a caste of vulnerable laborers. Employer-sponsored visa programs and the illegal-labor market give businesses a workforce with less power to leave, bargain, report injuries, or complain about dangerous conditions. A worker whose ability to remain in the country depends on his job is beholden to the boss in ways a citizen is not. The H1-B is not a member but a servant. That dependence presses down wages, weakens workplace standards, and allows whole industries to avoid the hard work of raising productivity and attracting Americans with better pay.

Immigration restriction protects the integrity of the receiving community and the value of the citizen’s labor. It also refuses the moral obscenity of importing human beings for uses Americans consider beneath them. If there are jobs that Americans will not do, those are jobs that we should not expect others to do for us.

At a deeper level, hospitality is only possible because there is a household, a table, and provisions. A nation can only be welcoming when it freely determines how many newcomers it can receive, enforces that determination, and expects those admitted to join the common life of the country. Limits allow entrance to become membership. If you abolish ICE and open the border, you close membership in America to migrants and natives.

Vice President JD Vance now states the economic connection in contemporary political language. In his 2025 American Dynamism speech, he described offshoring factories to cheap-labor countries and importing cheap labor through immigration as two versions of the same failed strategy. Both let employers substitute labor arbitrage for investment, innovation, and higher wages.

A Conservative in Full

The Southern Agrarians argued in I’ll Take My Stand—a book Berry encountered in college and which he said had a profound effect on him—that the problem with what they called industrialism was not so much the machines themselves but the way it warped the people who supposedly operated them. The machine trained people to measure prosperity in money, to despise subsistence, to exchange independence for convenience, and to regard inherited places as obstacles to development.

He took the Agrarians’ stand forward in his own way, through his own Kentucky. You can chart it on a single sheet of paper. Donald Davidson and Andrew Lytle defended the household and the region against consolidation. Richard Weaver, who studied under Davidson, traced modern disorder to the loss of transcendent standards and defended property as a material basis of independence. Russell Kirk gathered these insights into a conservatism of affection, prescription, restraint, and the permanent things. Willmoore Kendall insisted that self-government belongs to an actual historical people, capable of deliberating about a common good.

Berry spoke the same political language with the accent of Port Royal. Localism, human scale, rootedness, limits, reverence, and opposition to treating land or labor as an expendable commodity are core political conservatism.

The traditionalist right recognized him. Russell Kirk reviewed The Unsettling of America in 1978 and called Berry an heir worthy of the Southern Agrarians. Kirk praised him as a champion of work and thrift and concluded that humane culture had no better friend. In 1994, the Ingersoll Foundation and the Rockford Institute, publisher of Chronicles, gave Berry the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing. The companion Ingersoll prize was named for Richard Weaver. Chronicles published Berry’s acceptance speech and repeatedly treated his work as part of the living agrarian and traditionalist inheritance. In 2012, Berry accepted the Russell Kirk Paideia Prize. Two years later, he received the Allen Tate Poetry Prize.

It’s almost a secret lineage now. I’ll carry it forward a bit more. I met Russell Kirk when I was in college and formed a friendship with one of his daughters. Kirk supported Buchanan’s presidential campaign, and I went to work for it. The veterans of the Buchanan Brigades were early and eager supporters of Donald Trump.

This history is inconvenient for Berry’s progressive admirers who want the farmer’s environmentalism without his limits, his local food without his local loyalties, his solicitude for migrants without his immigration restrictionism, and his criticism of corporations without his protectionism. It is inconvenient for the dead-enders of the free-market right, which wants his family, faith, and moral vocabulary without his judgment on cheap imports, cheap labor, agribusiness, and the uprooting power of capital. They want a tame Berry.

His political legacy belongs most clearly to the right that kept together what the postwar consensus pulled apart: the agrarian and the industrial worker, the family and its economic foundation, patriotism and peace, national sovereignty and local self-rule. Today its most eloquent national political voice belongs to Vance, whose account of Middletown, Ohio, begins where Berry always began: a particular community paid the price for an abstraction called progress. It is perhaps not coincidental that Vance’s roots are also in Kentucky.

The Politics of Coming Home

Berry’s essays and poetry built the soil from which my own economic nationalism grew. Years later, when I went to work for Pat Buchanan, I found those premises translated into a fighting political vocabulary. Trump brought the instruments of national power to bear: tariffs, borders, the rejection of managed decline, and the insistence that the American government owes its first economic duty to the American people. Vance has begun to give the project a fuller account of work, family, place, and productive citizenship.

America first must begin with the things that are near: the spouse, the child, the neighbor, the worker, the field, the shop, the town, the river whose name you know. Love of country gathers those affections and gives them political defense.

That is the politics of coming home.

Berry once said that if the Gospels, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence were subtracted from his work, there would not be much left. His America was a covenant among the living, the dead, the unborn, and the land that bears them. He wasn’t a tame writer. But he was good.

There have been many times in my life when I’ve pursued a trail of thought, an intellectual path that seems undiscovered or long abandoned, a forgotten way, only to come across a fence post scratched with the letters WB. Wendell Berry was here before me, I realized. Of course he was.

After the girls and dogs had gone to bed and after I had read the obituaries, I went to my bookshelves and took down every book by Berry that I could find. The next few hours were spent with Berry’s thoughts and words, discovering again that he has been down these trails before us, clearing the way. And that’s the first thing and last thing I would recommend to readers of tonight’s newsletter: read as much Berry as you can get your hands on, read him on paper, unrushed, with a pen in hand and a notebook nearby.

Soon the toad in our front yard will go down into the earth, beneath the frost line, carrying the substance of summer into winter. Wendell Berry has gone into his Kentucky ground. What he kept faith with is now ours to keep.

The country he loved remains in our care.