When I woke up to the news that the writer Wendell Berry had died at 92, my mind turned to a conversation I had back in 2007 on his Kentucky farm with his wife Tanya. I was part of a small group of young conservative writers who made the pilgrimage to meet the great man.
“Wendell doesn’t understand why so many of you conservatives love him,” she told me. “We’re just a couple of old New Deal Democrats.”
“Well,” I said, “there are different kinds of conservatives. Your husband is our kind.”
And then I told her about my book Crunchy Cons, which had been out for a year, and in which Wendell Berry appears, quoted approvingly. Most of us are Christians, I said, and believe in what you might call a sacramental vision of life—and this doesn’t sit comfortably with either the modern Democrats or modern Republicans, who are devoted in their different ways to material progress, and tearing down any barriers to individual self-expression.
Tanya was polite, but I don’t think she got it. That was fine. Most of our conservative friends didn’t, either. They thought of us as crypto-liberals.
The fact is, Wendell Berry really was a small-c conservative, in that he cherished the old, human decencies, and fought like a dungareed Don Quixote, tilting with his writer’s pen against the modern world and its mechanical ways. He was no fool; Berry knew he was waging a losing war. But he fought it anyway, with the conviction of an Old Testament prophet.
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