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)

Anglospherics

Presidents Republican Liberty

FATHER:

The Man Who Would Not Be King (David Boaz, 2/20/26, Cato)

What values did Washington’s character express? He was a farmer, a businessman, an enthusiast for commerce. As a man of the Enlightenment, he was deeply interested in scientific farming. His letters on running Mount Vernon are longer than letters on running the government. (Of course, in 1795 more people worked at Mount Vernon than in the entire executive branch of the federal government.)

He was also a liberal and tolerant man. In a famous letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, he hailed the “liberal policy” of the United States on religious freedom as worthy of emulation by other countries. He explained, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

And most notably, he held “republican” values – that is, he believed in a republic of free citizens, with a government based on consent and established to protect the rights of life, liberty, and property.

From his republican values Washington derived his abhorrence of kingship, even for himself. The writer Garry Wills called him “a virtuoso of resignations.” He gave up power not once but twice – at the end of the revolutionary war, when he resigned his military commission and returned to Mount Vernon, and again at the end of his second term as president, when he refused entreaties to seek a third term. In doing so, he set a standard for American presidents that lasted until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose taste for power was stronger than the 150 years of precedent set by Washington.

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.

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.

Iron Lady

eNDING hISTORY:

The Iron Lady Confronts Socialism (Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, February 6, 2026, Providence)

A Soviet propagandist for the newspaper Red Star intended “Iron Lady” as an insult; so did TASS (official Soviet state media) and other press. Thatcher astutely embraced “Iron Lady” at Finchley, “I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my hair gently waived, the Iron Lady of the Western world.” Then she strategically drove home the point: “Yes, I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke, yes if that’s how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.”

At a time of detente when Western diplomats wanted to settle and communists wanted to win, when America was in decline after defeat in Vietnam and the scandal of Watergate, and when the Soviets were on the march on several continents, Thatcher said no. She said no clearly, and she explained why. She also channeled her inner Churchill and was willing to stand alone. The start of the political partnership between Prime Minister Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan was five years ahead in a future that was neither known nor determined.

By dint of her family upbringing, Christian faith, and education, Thatcher lived by and championed individual liberty, personal responsibility and hard work, community rather than collectivism, free markets, and a limited state. She believed that Karl Marx and his heirs regarded socialism as a transitional stage on the way to full communism and thus meant the end of the West; she took on the most destructive political ideology yet created by man from the start of her career. “We believe in the freedom of the democratic way of life,” she wrote in her 1950 New Year’s Eve message as a first-time, prospective candidate for Parliament. “Communism seizes power by force, not by free choice of the people….We must firstly believe in the Western way of life and serve it steadfastly. Secondly we must build up our fighting strength to be prepared to defend our ideals, for aggressive nations understand only the threat of force.”

Thatcher developed her core understanding about big-brother communism and little-sister socialism, as she honed her communication skills to educate supporters and counter opponents. Politics and economics were morally and consistently intertwined in her position. In a 1968 speech entitled “What’s Wrong with Politics,” Thatcher, while Conservative shadow minister for fuel and power, maintained that “[m]oney is not an end in itself,” and that “even the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help, otherwise he too would have had to pass on the other side.” In her view, communism and socialism—in their varying degrees—suffered from the same source problem of “too much,” too big, and too centralized government, which robbed the people of their right and ability to practice self-government.

End of History Latin America

WHEN YOU FINALLY HAVE A FUTURE:

Milei Hunts for Over $250 Billion That Argentines Have Hidden in Secret Stashes (Samantha Pearson and Silvina Frydlewsky, Feb. 3, 2026, WSJ)

Along the leafy boulevards of Buenos Aires, optimism is rising as the government softens financial controls, encouraging Argentines to plow previously undeclared cash into everything from cars to real estate.

“Customers are getting bolder, there is less need to hide things,” said Fabian Luciani, a car salesman in the city for the past 25 years. More than half of his clients pay in cash, he said, sometimes with dollars that families say have been buried in their backyards for years.

The color of the notes is usually a dead giveaway.

“They’ve got yellowish, brownish stains—you know, from humidity,” Luciani said, musing about how many dollars now sitting in the U.S. Treasury bear the stains of Argentine soil.

Cheeto Jesus Identitarianism

BERNIE BRO IN CHIEF:

The ‘Affordability’ Horseshoe: The president is stealing progressive Democrats’ worst economic ideas. (Scott Lincicome, February 4, 2026, The Dispatch)


Trump was never a doctrinaire Reaganite supply-sider, of course, but his embrace of domestic economic policies championed by U.S. progressives is the clearest evidence yet that the “horseshoe” theory of politics—i.e., that the extreme left and extreme right have more in common with each other than with the moderate center—is alive and well in the United States. The similarities have been clearest on trade, where both the far left and far right uniformly disdain “globalization” and the “elites” who supposedly use it to profit at The People’s expense. But we now see the same parallels in domestic economic policy, too—both in the details and the script that each policy follows: target common enemies and offer easy solutions to complex problems—solutions that don’t actually work and, in fact, can often make things worse for the very people that they claim to be helping.

Trump’s “affordability” proposals follow the “horseshoe economics” script to the letter. Smacking institutional investors (aka “Wall Street”) might make for a great populist soundbite, but as housing expert Jay Parsons explained at considerable length (and as we’ve discussed here at Capitolism), there’s simply no good case for the ban, which would likely harm rental markets yet have a minimal effect on the supply of single family homes—even in investor-rich markets. (My Cato Institute colleague Norbert Michel has more on this myth in The Dispatch this week.)

Trump’s populist attack on Big Meat would be similarly ineffective: As Reason’s Jack Nicastro explains, there’s no evidence that meatpackers are, as Trump alleges, “criminally profiting at the expense of the American People,” because the real culprit for high beef prices is the greatly reduced supply of cattle in the United States and from Mexico, which is struggling to stave off the New World screwworm. (More bad news on that front today, unfortunately. Sorry, fellow carnivores.)


Other proposals, meanwhile, would be downright bad for most Americans

Republican Liberty

IT’S A PURITAN NATION:

REVIEW: Righteous Strife By Richard Carwardine (Tom Peebles, February 1, 2026, Washington Independent Review of Books)

As a rising political star and presidential candidate in the newly formed Republican Party, Lincoln appeared to entertain a broad and bland view of God as the creative presence behind the universe but not an entity actively involved in human affairs — a perspective at odds with most religious nationalists on both sides. As wartime president, however, his theological perspective took what Carwardine terms a “providentialist turn,” in which he acknowledged a “God who intervened in the life of the nation for his own mysterious purposes.” This shift brought Lincoln ever closer to the “historic Calvinism that colored much of Northern Protestantism,” and thus into broad theological alignment with both anti-slavery and conservative religious nationalists.

But Lincoln’s spiritual metamorphosis was intertwined with his evolution regarding the slavery question. The pre-presidential Lincoln had advocated for the containment of slavery in locations where it already existed. Yet as war president, his anti-slavery convictions deepened. A “more capacious moral framework,” Carwardine argues, led Lincoln to “embrace emancipation…and equality of civic opportunity for both black and white.” As the war progressed, Lincoln’s thinking on these intertwined issues came to align with anti-slavery religious nationalists, although for a remarkably long period, he was able maintain the support of both sides.

Lincoln did not lose substantial support among conservative religious nationalists until, fortified by a series of battlefield successes, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day 1863, the “most important presidential edict since the foundation of the republic” in Carwardine’s words.

Sovereignty

SOVEREIGNTY REQUIRES SELF-DETERMINATION:

Greenland’s Inuit Have Spent Decades Fighting for Self-DeterminationL While contemporary Greenland encompasses this range of lifestyles, Kalaallit are unified in their desire for self-determination. Greenland’s leaders have delivered this message clearly to the public and to the White House directly. (Susan A. Kaplan and Genevieve LeMoine, 1/30/26, The Conversation)

The U.S. formally recognized Denmark’s claim to the island in 1916 when the Americans purchased the Danish West Indies, which are now the U.S. Virgin Islands. And in 1921, Denmark declared sovereignty over the whole of Greenland, a claim upheld in 1933 by the Permanent Court of International Justice. But Greenlanders were not consulted about these decisions. […]

In a 1979 Greenland-wide referendum, a substantial majority of Kalaallit voters opted for what was called “home rule” within the Danish Kingdom. That meant a parliament of elected Kalaallit representatives handled internal affairs, such as education and social welfare, while Denmark retained control of foreign affairs and mineral rights.

However, the push for full independence from Denmark continued: In 2009, home rule was replaced by a policy of self-government, which outlines a clear path to independence from Denmark, based on negotiations following a potential future referendum vote by Greenlanders. Self-government also allows Greenland to assert and benefit from control over its mineral resources, but not to manage foreign affairs.

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