Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

February 2026

Books Puritan Nation Republican Liberty

PEOPLE OF THE ARC:

Is Grit the American Virtue? (Phillip M. Pinell, 2/12/26, Ford Forum Observer)

For Mattie, grit means follow-through. It is the ability to do one’s job—however brutal—without flinching. Rooster’s violence is not admirable to her in itself, but it is evidence that he will persevere. Even this God-fearing young Presbyterian, no friend of vice, concludes that moral squeamishness is not a prerequisite for justice. Her father has been murdered. Justice requires the murderer be caught and hanged. Nothing more, nothing less. This is an Old Testament conception of justice, not as mercy to one’s enemy, but as measure-for-measure.

Yet as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Mattie possesses more grit than the man she hires. Despite Rooster’s attempts to leave her behind, she follows him into dangerous, unfamiliar terrain. She eats little, sleeps less, and refuses every opportunity to give up. Unlike Rooster, who is motivated by money, Mattie is animated by a righteous sense of duty. Her upbringing has made her the opposite of Rooster: law-abiding, methodical, stubbornly principled. And yet she, not Rooster, ultimately kills Chaney with her father’s own rifle.

This tension—between the lawless grit of Rooster and the principled grit of Mattie—captures something fundamental about the American character as imagined in our national mythology. If America is shaped by the dispositions of those who came before, Mattie embodies the perseverance of early American settlers and frontier families, the relentless Protestant insistence that injustice must be confronted directly, that one must not shrink from doing hard things oneself. Her world is set fifty years after Tocqueville’s travels, yet she would not look out of place in his account of the determined, self-reliant Americans of Jacksonian America.

The Western endures because it dramatizes this dual nature of American grit. Sometimes it manifests as admirable perseverance, sometimes as dangerous vigilante hardness. But it is unmistakably American in its insistence that adversity is not an excuse to retreat.

Technology

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

Quantum computers will finally be useful: what’s behind the revolution (Davide Castelvecchi, 2/10/26, Nature)

The pace of progress in the field has picked up dramatically, especially in the past two years or so, along several fronts. Teams in academic laboratories, as well as companies ranging from small start-ups to large technology corporations, have drastically reduced the size of errors that notoriously fickle quantum devices tend to produce, by improving both the manufacturing of quantum devices and the techniques used to control them. Meanwhile, theorists better understand how to use quantum devices more efficiently.

“At this point, I am much more certain that quantum computation will be realized, and that the timeline is much shorter than people thought,” says Dorit Aharonov, a computer scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “We’ve entered a new era.”

Conservative Thought

CONSERVATISM SEEKS TO CONSERVE LIBERALISM:

Toward a Conservatism of Hope: a review of Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer by John D. Wilsey (Brady C. Graves, February 10, 2026, Modern Age)

Wilsey argues that “American conservatism since 1990 has demonstrated a turn towards Ottantottism,” a term Peter Viereck used for a reactionary disposition, and “while the Ottantott may see change as inherently bad and something to be resisted, the measured Burkean conservative—the conservative of American tradition—sees change, while inexorable, through the lens of caution.”

The modern perception of conservatism tends to be that it is prudish, stuffy, and roundly unimaginative. Wilsey laments that “the rightism of contemporary times is populist, obsessed with politics, and fueled by social-media-inspired outrage in a similar style as their leftist counterparts. The American Right has thus far failed to conserve American ideals, Western civilization and culture, and religious values and liberty.” Modern conservatism is so inflammatory, Wilsey argues, because it has abandoned its moorings.

When political expedience superseded transcendent virtue, conservatism morphed into political rightism. Wilsey proposes that conservatives should coalesce not around policy stances or political candidates but around a shared commitment to the transcendent as manifested through the good, the true, and the beautiful. When conservatism’s telos becomes political power, it loses its soul and its imagination and ceases to be conservatism. Echoing Burke, Kirk, and Weaver, Wilsey then concludes that “belief in the transcendent is primary in conservative thought.”

Health

SUCK IT UP, BUTTERCUP:

‘What I see in clinic is never a set of labels’: are we in danger of overdiagnosing mental illness? (Gavin Francis, 10 Feb 2026, The Guardian)

Research tells us that the human brain hasn’t changed much in the past 300,000 years, and mental suffering has surely been with us for as long as we have experienced mental life. We are all vessels for thoughts, feelings and desires that wash through our minds, influencing our mental state. Some patterns of feeling are recognisable across the millennia, but the labels we use to make sense of the mind and of mental health are always changing – which means there’s always scope to change them for the better.

The subject is important, because according to modern psychiatric definitions, the 21st century is seeing an epidemic of mental illness. The line between health and ill-health of the mind has never been more blurred. A survey in 2019 found that two-thirds of young people in the UK felt they have had a mental disorder. We are broadening the criteria for what counts as illness at the same time as lowering the thresholds for diagnosis. This is not a bad thing if it helps us feel better, but evidence is gathering that as a society it may be making us feel worse.

We have developed a tendency to categorise mild to moderate mental and emotional distress as a necessarily clinical problem rather than an integral part of being human – a tendency that is new in our own culture, and not widely shared with others. Psychiatrists who work across different cultures point out that, in many non-western societies, low mood, anxiety and delusional states are seen more as spiritual, relational or religious problems – not psychiatric ones. By making sense of states of mind through terms that are embedded in community and tradition, they may even have more success at incorporating our crises of mind into the stories of our lives.

Pretend illness beats personal responsibility.

Immigration

A LEGACY OF RACISM:

Trade, Immigration, and the Forces of Political Culture: America was founded as a “society of equals.” Technological or demographic changes that threaten that ideal have long provoked sharp political responses. (Stephen Haber, February 9, 2026, Freedom Frequency)

It was not long before another technological change—the fall in transport costs induced by improvements in passenger steamships—created a new challenge to America’s society of equals. Immigrants from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, China, and Japan, who would work for wages well below those of native-born workers, began arriving in large numbers.

The political response to technologically induced demographic change was sharp.

In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, which effectively banned the immigration of Chinese women to the United States. It was followed in 1882 by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers and denied Chinese already in the United States the right to become naturalized citizens. In 1905, the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League was established in California to expand the Chinese Exclusion Act to immigrants from those countries. The result was the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, in which the Japanese government agreed not to issue passports for Japanese citizens wishing to work in the United States.

Restrictions on Southern and Eastern European immigration soon followed. A 1917 law required immigrants to pass a literacy test. In 1921 an Emergency Quota Act limited the number of immigrants from any country outside the Western Hemisphere to 3 percent of the foreign-born persons of that nationality living in the United States in 1910. It therefore sharply curtailed what had been virtually unlimited European immigration and at the same time favored Northern and Western Europeans, who were numerically dominant in the United States in the 1910 census, over poorer immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

It was followed by the even more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which prevented immigration from Asia, capped total immigration at 165,000, and set quotas for Europeans at 2 percent of their US population in the 1890 census (when Eastern and Southern Europeans were an even smaller minority than in the 1910 census, thereby further curtailing their numbers).

America’s restrictive immigration policies endured for decades. The Chinese Exclusion Act remained on the books until 1943, when the United States and China were allied against Japan during World War II. The quotas of the 1924 Immigration Act remained until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which established a preference system based on attracting highly skilled workers and reunifying families.

Identitarianism

ESCAPING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY:

A persuasive critique of identity politics: Valorising the victim gives us not a more just world, but a world with less moral and aesthetic content (Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert, 2/08/26, The Critic)

The ideology of victimhood operates as an ersatz morality. Once status is conferred by self-appointed “experts”, social, institutional and material advantages often follow. But, as Daouda reiterates throughout her book, there is a high cost to acquiring victim status, namely, the renunciation of one’s personhood as a free-willed agent.

As always, Eric Hoffer described it best:

Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden…We join
a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young
Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared
themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves
cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not
joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?

Sovereignty

IF NOT A NATION THEN A STATE:

How Bad Bunny Gives Voice to Puerto Rico’s ‘Crisis Generation’ (Patricia Mazzei and Laura N. Pérez Sánchez, Feb. 8, 2026, NY Times)

Puerto Rico has been a territory of the United States since 1898, after U.S. forces invaded it during the Spanish-American War. In 1917, Congress extended American citizenship to Puerto Ricans, but they cannot vote in presidential elections, have only symbolic representation in Congress and do not have equal access to federal benefits.

Above all, young Puerto Ricans appear intent on re-examining Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States, in light of two defining events of the past decade.

In 2016, Congress passed a law empowering a board appointed by the president to oversee the island’s finances, taking away much of its financial independence and stirring accusations that it was treating Puerto Rico like a colony. The bungled response to Hurricane Maria further eroded Puerto Ricans’ trust in the federal government.

Bad Bunny worked with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a Puerto Rican historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on text-based videos for his album last year, explaining crucial periods in Puerto Rican history. Some were displayed on big screens during Bad Bunny’s concert residency in Puerto Rico over the summer.

Dr. Meléndez-Badillo called the artist’s Super Bowl performance an opportunity for Puerto Ricans — and everyone else — to have more conversations about the island’s current state and its future.

“I’m seeing this as a pedagogical thing that Benito is doing,” he said. “He’s not simply repping the Puerto Rican flag. He’s also inviting people to grapple with the beauty and messiness of Puerto Rican-ness. A lot of people in the United States don’t really know Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States.”

Time for another stab at self-determination.

Identitarianism Just So Stories

WE’LL HAVE PLENTY LEFT WHEN WE CRASH INTO THE SUN:

The postliberal war on economics (Phil Magness, Feb 06, 2026, The Argument)

In a 2007 blog post, Deneen predicted an impending societal collapse from environmental degradation, noting “in all likelihood we’ll experience some severe civilizational dislocation in coming months and years as a result of peak oil.”

Peak Oil Theory was a trendy doctrine from the 2000s that foresaw an imminent natural resource depletion, whereupon fossil fuel energy production would enter into a rapid and irreversible decline. Widespread shortages and economic collapse would soon follow as our oil-dependent economy could no longer sustain consumption at current levels.

It has since fallen by the wayside among environmentalists as new fossil fuel exploration and better extraction technologies vastly expanded the world’s estimated oil reserves. Green activists today have shifted their arguments to emphasize climate change as their leading concern, even arguing for intentional fossil fuel sequestration on the grounds that the Earth’s atmosphere cannot handle the emissions that would arise from currently known oil reserves.

But for Deneen, the snapshot claims of late 2000s Peak Oil Theory provided the “eureka” moment that led him to develop postliberalism. He recounted this much on his blog:

[W]hen I learned about “peak oil” – that is, the imminent depletion of roughly half the world’s oil reserves, and by far the easiest accessible and cheapest stuff – it finally made sense to me why a political philosophy that I had long held to be fundamentally false – modern liberalism – nevertheless had prospered for roughly the past 100 years and had gone into hyper-drive over the past half-century.

Modern liberalism – the philosophy premised upon a belief in individual autonomy, one that rejected the centrality of culture and tradition, that eschewed the goal or aim of cultivation toward the good established by dint of (human) nature itself, that regarded all groups and communities as arbitrarily formed and therefore alterable at will, that emphasized the primacy of economic growth as a precondition of the good society and upon that base developed a theory of progress (material as well as moral), and one that valorized the human will itself as the source of sufficient justification for the human mastery of nature, including human nature (e.g., biotechnological improvement of the species) – is against nature, and therefore ought not to have “worked.”

In this telling, the posited resource limitations of Peak Oil Theory revealed not just the source of the coming environmental disaster, but its culpable party, which is to say liberalism — and specifically economic liberalism — itself.

The explosion of economic prosperity from the 18th-century stirrings of the Industrial Revolution to the present day depended upon fossil fuel in the literal sense. In Deneen’s reasoning, that fuel came from a limited resource that would soon be depleted. The Great Enrichment of the modern era, and indeed humanity’s escape from the multi-thousand-year Malthusian Trap of hunger and stagnation, only came about through artificial means that elevated humanity’s economic consumption beyond its “natural” state.

From Darwinism to Marxism to PostLiberalism, no bad idea has done more damage than Malthusianism.

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