The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
Interpretation
Wealth and political power, when intertwined, undermine democracy and the common good.
Wendell Berry's quote highlights the detrimental effects of the close relationship between political power and wealth. This alignment threatens the commonwealth, representing the shared resources and prosperity of communities, which in turn weakens democracy itself, as true democratic principles are rooted in equitable access to resources and a healthy local economy.
In practice
In a speech advocating for local businesses, you might say, 'As Wendell Berry reminds us, the alignment of political power with wealth threatens our democracy and local economies.'
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.
When all the objectives of government include the achievement of equality - other than equality before the law - that government poses a threat to liberty.
Liberal and conservative have lost their meaning in America. I represent the distracted center.
I tried to contribute to the defeat of the Soviets. If I contributed 1%, it is 1% of something enormous.
I intend to talk about race during this election in the South because the Republicans have been talking about it since 1968 in order to divide us. And I'm going to bring us together. Because you know what? You know what? White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us and not them, because their kids don't have health insurance either and their kids need better schools too.
Democracies are slow to anger and hesitant to go to war: Voters don't want to sacrifice their children for the glory of a selfish king.
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