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)

Books

Books Conservative Thought Film/TV

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Two Classics: “Crime and Punishment” and “Columbo” (Dwight Longenecker, September 16th, 2025, Imaginative Conservative)

So Columbo, like Crime and Punishment, is a classic, and rightfully so because it too penetrates to the heart of a modern heresy and exposes it for the lie that it is. This is the Nietzschean idea of the ubermensch—the superman who can transcend ordinary law. Nietzsche formalized the idea later in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but Dostoevsky has Raskolnikov echoing proto-Nietzschean concepts: the utilitarian and Hegelian theories abroad in nineteenth-century Russia.

Columbo deflates the arrogance of his suspects; in the final scene each murderer is humbled. So Dostoevsky critiques the superman heresy by showing that Raskolnikov does not have the emotional fortitude to live with his irrevocable act. His final humiliation (and salvation) is to accept the unconditional love of Sonya and to pursue the path of repentance and reparation.

Books Conservative Thought Identitarianism Russia

COMPLETE WITH THEIR OWN CHEETO NAPOLEON:

‘Animal Farm’ Never Gets Old: Orwell’s classic turns 80. (Cathy Young, Sep 26, 2025, The Bulwark)

The Soviet parallels in the novel, in which animals on a farm run by the drunk and abusive Mr. Jones band together to drive out their two-legged oppressors and set out to build a haven of freedom and equality for all beasts, are very explicit—right down to specific characters, events, and symbols. Napoleon, the crafty boar who eventually becomes Animal Farm’s totalitarian dictator with a personality cult, clearly represents Stalin; his rival Snowball, who co-leads the revolution but gets outmaneuvered, forced into exile, and branded a traitor—and blamed for everything that goes wrong on the farm—is Trotsky with trotters. (Early on, there’s also a Marx-Lenin mashup: Old Major, the wise boar who inspires the revolt before dying and has his skull reverentially displayed on a post, much like Lenin’s mummified body in the mausoleum in Red Square.) The farm’s flag—a white hoof and horn on a green field—echoes the red flag with the hammer and sickle. Like the early Soviet revolutionaries, the animals throw themselves into enthusiastic labor to make their experiment work, and normal practices turn into political projects: “the Egg Production Committee for the hens,” “the Clean Tails League for the cows,” and “the Whiter Wool Movement for the sheep.”

Soon, the resemblances turn much darker. In an episode that clearly echoes the Holodomor, the mostly man-made famine Stalin used to break the back of peasant resistance to collectivization (and crush Ukrainian nationalism), hens who resist orders to surrender their eggs for trading are starved into submission. Later, the purges and show trials begin. As the assembled animals watch in horror, four pigs who had criticized Napoleon earlier are dragged before him by his pack of trained hounds, confess to treasonous collaboration with Snowball, and are at once dispatched by the same dogs. […]

But in 2025, Americans may be reading this novel with somewhat different eyes than in times gone by, when strongman rule, cult-like worship of leaders, and reality-denying propaganda were things that happened somewhere else. Today, it’s hard to read Orwell’s mordant description of the extravagant panegyrics to Napoleon (“two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, ‘Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!’”) and not think of the examples we are witnessing daily—from the downright idolatrous sensibility common among Trump’s base to administration officials falling all over each other to heap praise on Trump at a cabinet meeting, or a member of Congress telling reporters Trump is “never wrong,” or press secretary Karoline Leavitt gushing, “Cracker Barrel is a great American company, and they made a great decision to Trust in Trump!” Likewise, when Orwell wryly notes that the animals “had nothing to go upon except Squealer’s lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better,” one can’t help thinking of Trump firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner who wouldn’t deliver that message.

The rewriting of slogans, the insidious conspiracies invoked to explain anything that goes wrong, the propaganda chief convincing the other animals that things they saw with their own eyes didn’t happen or happened very differently: The parallels are all over the place.

While the normals keep the aspidistra flying…

Anglospherics Books

THE NIGHT WATCH:

Life’s Value: a review of The Children of Men by p. d. james (Alan Jacobs, August 1, 1993, First Things)

It would be unwarranted to call this novel an apology for Christianity, and yet the title encourages us to think along such lines. Its origin is the ninetieth Psalm—in this case, the version that appears in the burial rite of the old (1662) Anglican Book of Common Prayer, a rite that is not just quoted but that actually figures in the novel: “Lord, thou hast been our refuge: from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made: thou art God from everlasting, and world without end. Thou turnest man to destruction: again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night.”

This might sound positively evangelistic; after all, in the context of the burial rite, it is a call to sinners to repent while they still may. But in the novel the character who pronounces these words believes neither in them nor in God. He is the narrator of much of the book and the protagonist of the whole, Theo Faron, an Oxford don (Merton College, Victorian history) and a skeptic—or rather, a man too tired and hopeless and beaten down by life to believe in anything. (In this he resembles almost everyone else in his world.) It is one of James’ deftest touches to make her main character an unbeliever; indeed, only two characters in the book are Christians, and only one of them, a woman named Julian, a major figure. (Yes, we are invited to think of Julian of Norwich.) Thus Julian’s faith and Theo’s lack of it have equal claims upon our attention, and James leaves us free to assess the validity and persuasiveness of each. Nevertheless, the words of the Psalm have a force all their own, independent of the character who utters them, a fact of which Theo himself is well aware.

Why, one might ask, is the old Anglican prayer book in use in England in 2021, when it has been largely abandoned in the Church of England in 1993? This question leads us to one of James’ most intriguing and subtly developed themes: the uselessness of liberal theology in a time of profound crisis. Christian theological liberalism has typically discarded orthodox eschatology in favor of a mild and essentially secular meliorism. But when people are faced with the apparent extinction of the human species, the belief in moral and material progress that undergirds such meliorism becomes, to say the least, untenable. James’ story convincingly demonstrates that in such a world people will hold to a fully supernatural faith—in which hope is quite specifically a theological virtue—or they will abandon hope altogether. Extreme situations call forth extreme responses; comfortable middle-of-the-road liberalism has no claim on anyone’s attention in such a world. What remains in that case is either to hear the call of God when “again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men,” or to seek whatever passing pleasures a broken and truncated world offers.

In James’ imagined future, the truly hopeless turn to the government for the provision of those pleasures. England is ruled by a man named Xan Lyppiat (Theo Faron’s cousin), who styles himself the Warden; his job, as he understands it, is chiefly to protect his doomed subjects from boredom, discomfort, and disorder. The people of England, it seems, are ready to give the Warden absolute power in return for such benefits. Though the machinery of democracy remains more or less in place, virtually no one cares to exercise his or her voting rights. Democracy too dies in the absence of hope for the future.

Books Republican Liberty

THE RESTRAINT OF FREEDOM IS THE GENIUS OF REPUBLICAN LIBERTY:

The Horror of Unlimited Freedom: a review of The Lives of the Caesars By Suetonius, Translated by Tom Holland (John Byron Kuhner, May 12, 2025, Compass)


It is easy to feel that our era loves the Roman Empire too much, and the frugal, law-abiding, freedom-loving Roman Republic too little. I would rather see a new Hollywood movie about Scipio Africanus than another Gladiator retread. Yet the basic reason for having a republic at all is found on every page of the Lives. The emperors are powerful, but with this power comes no grace, no elevation of virtue or capacity to justify such power. In the very Caesars themselves, who have given their name to absolute power in the West for millennia, Suetonius can find no mystique. Here are no heroes, no mandate of heaven. They are caliphs of nobody. Just human beings, no more. He makes sure to describe them all as if naked: “potbellied,” “balding,” “speckled with birthmarks,” “with splayed feet and bandy legs.” In his introduction, Holland claims that “Suetonius was not, nor had any wish to be, a historian… He did not bother himself with the precise details of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, nor of the ferociously complex political machinations that had accompanied Augustus’ rise to power, nor of the tortured relationship between Tiberius and his fellow aristocrats.” Perhaps he merely wrote a different type of history, and for different reasons. Historians tend to swaddle their subjects in great robes of historical dignity. Suetonius depicts what is under everyone’s clothes.

We tend to think of the arrival of Julius Caesar and the destruction of the Republic as the end of freedom. Suetonius, by focusing on the persons of the emperors, shows that this reading is incorrect. In fact, the arrival of the Empire meant unlimited freedom—for one individual. Indeed this book is primarily a study in such freedom. Caligula during a meal with two friends suddenly begins laughing, and when asked why, he answers, “Why, only that with a single nod I could have either of your throats cut here and now!” Augustus is dining with a friend when he gets up, takes the man’s wife away, has sex with her, and returns, “with her hair dishevelled and her face bright red from ear to ear.” He knew the husband and wife were powerless to oppose him.

This is a sobering thought for every republic, that freedom corrupted might well devolve in this way. The worst form of slavery is a society where the leaders feel themselves completely free. What is slavery itself, but someone else’s freedom over you?

Books

HARD CASE:

The Enduring Influence of James M. Cain: How Cain’s work shifted the focus of crime fiction and passed on a legacy to new generations of authors. (Tom Milani, 5/12/25, Crime Reads)

When he got fed up with his job at The New Yorker, he finally accepted an offer from Paramount, believing that moving west would help him solidify his voice as an author. By 1931, Cain was indeed headed for Hollywood. Unlike some of the authors who preceded him there—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, et al.—Cain had limited success as a fiction writer before he arrived, and so the charge of being a sellout didn’t apply. In fact, the opposite occurred as his literary reputation began to expand, beginning with the short story “The Baby in the Icebox,” published in The American Mercury and then sold to Paramount.

With more confidence, Cain began writing a novel based loosely two news stories he’d read—one about a female gas station attendant who ended up killing her husband, the other about a woman and her lover who conspire to murder her husband before turning on each other afterwards. Because of its length (35,000 words) and perceived problems with the ending, the novel, titled “Bar-B-Que,” was conditionally accepted by Alfred A. Knopf. After considerable back-and-forth between Cain and the publisher, the book was finally published as is save for the title. “Bar-B-Que” became “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

Upon its release in 1934, Postman went—and there is no other word to better describe it—viral, with rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic and best seller status for hardcover and paperback editions, along with adaptations for serial, stage, and screen.

Cain’s next project was an eight-part serial, its title suggested by Jim Geller, his agent, and inspired by his own experience in the insurance industry. Titled “Double Indemnity,” the story was rejected by Redbook but eventually bought by Liberty. Like Postman, Double Indemnity went viral, if in a different way: people lined up to purchase the next issue of Liberty as soon as it was out.

Books

HOGWARTS 61 REVISITED:

Kierkegaarry Potter: Fear and Rowling (Adam Roberts, May 08, 2025, Substack-ships On Fire, Off The Shoulder Of Orion)

It’s the story of Abraham and Isaac from Isaac’s perspective; and it answers the question ‘but why must we die at the hands of the nom-de-la-mort Voldemort?’ with: because there is a little piece of this mort already inside your soul. But it does so in order to twist a surprise existential short-circuit out of the encounter: death ends up destroying not us but the shard of death inside us. Eucatastrophe!

This isn’t what Dumbledore thinks will happen, of course. It’s clear he believed that Harry would die. When his shade meets Harry after the event, he describes himself as a ‘master of Death’. ‘Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort?’ he asks, and the question is not a rhetorical one. ‘I too sought a way to conquer death, Harry.’

“Hallows, not Horcruxes.”

“Hallows,” murmured Dumbledore, “not Horcruxes. Precisely.” …

“Grindelwald was looking for them too?”

Dumbledore closed his eyes for a moment and nodded.

“It was the thing, above all, that drew us together,” he said quietly. “Two clever, arrogant boys with a shared obsession.”
[Deathly Hallows, ch. 35]

All the twists and turns of the seven novels, all the ‘Snape’s a baddie! no he’s a goodie! wrong, he’s a baddie! oh, final reveal, he’s a goodie!’ back and forth, they all resolve themselves into these three fundamentally Kiekegaardian problems. Is there a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical in the Potterverse? On what grounds might it operate? Voldemort, and Grindelwald, and young Albus all suspended the ethical in search of a particular telos: overcoming death. That led to great suffering: in Kierkegaardian terms, a tragic, rather than Abarahamic, outcome. But to continue with Kierkegaard’s problemata: how does the specific suspension of the ethical provision not to sacrifice Harry Potter merit any more suspension than those earlier experiments? Voldemort dispenses with the ethical for purely selfish reasons: that he himself might not die. Snape is prepared to do the same for less selfish reasons: to save the life of the woman he loves. But Dumbledore’s rebuke to him on this ground carries meaningful ethical force: “You do not care, then, about the deaths of her husband and child? They can die, as long as you have what you want?” Snape is abashed by this, and quite right too. So what about Dumbledore’s reasons for doing what he does? That’s trickier to justify, and trickier even to identify. The answer is to be found in the eucatastrophic survival of Harry himself, just as, in the Genesis story, Abraham’s faith is only retrospectively justified by the intervention of the angel, staying his hand. Could we say: the thing that justifies Dumbledore’s secret scheme literally to send Harry Potter to his death is that he is, in a Kiekegaardian sense, a knight of faith?

Books

THE DEBT TO YOUTH:

Kazuo Ishiguro Reflects on Never Let Me Go, 20 Years Later: On the Decades-Long Creative Process Behind His Most Successful Novel (Kazuo Ishiguro, May 5, 2025, LitHub)

[I]n the late 1990s, I belatedly noticed I was no longer a “young writer”—that there was a distinct and exciting new generation emerging in Britain, typically fifteen or so years younger than me. Some of these authors I read and admired from a distance. Others became friends.

For instance: Alex Garland (who’d then recently published The Beach) and I began a pattern—still continuing today—of meeting for rambling, informal lunches in North London cafés, and I soon noticed how he, without self-consciousness or posturing, often cited writers like J.G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John Wyndham. It was Alex who drew up for me a list of the most important graphic novels I had to read, introducing me to the work of important figures like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Alex was at that time writing a screenplay that would become the classic 2002 zombie dystopia film 28 Days Later. He showed me an early draft and I listened in fascination to him discussing the pros and cons of various ways forward.

And in the autumn of 2000, during a coast-to-coast U.S. book tour, my itinerary intersected three times with that of a young English author promoting his first novel. The novel was Ghostwritten and his name was David Mitchell—both at that point unknown to me. We found ourselves sitting in late-night lounges of hotels in the American Midwest, chilling after our respective events, competing to identify tunes the cocktail pianist was playing for us.

Alongside chat about Dickens and Dostoyevsky, I noted how he mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin, Rosemary Sutcliff, the recent Matrix movie, H.P. Lovecraft, schlocky old ghost and horror stories, fantasy literature. On returning home I read Ghostwritten and realized I’d been communing with a monster talent (an assessment that became more or less universal when he published Cloud Atlas three years later).

My growing familiarity with these younger colleagues excited and liberated me. They opened windows for me I’d not thought to open before. They not only educated me into a wider, vibrant culture, they brought to my own imagination new horizons.

Interesting that PD James too produced a great dystopian novel later in life.

Books Conservative Thought

BARD OF THE REPUBLIC:

Robert Frost: His poetry engages both the political and the transcendent (Peter J. Stanlis, Modern Age)

A philosophical dualist, Frost regarded spirit and matter as the two basic elements of reality. Human nature itself was composed of spirit and matter, or body and soul. As for religion, science, art, politics, and history, each was a different form of revelation. They were metaphors aimed at illuminating the True, the Good, and the Beautiful for the mind of man. Though he belonged to no church or sect, Frost admitted to being “an Old Testament Christian.” He accepted the Law of Moses in the Decalogue and believed justice between God and man, and justice between men, was paramount. He was highly critical, therefore, of those who sentimentalized Christ’s teachings through doctrines like universal salvation that neglected justice not only in religion but in every aspect of man’s life in society.

Frost greatly respected science and its contributions toward man’s knowledge of the laws and operations of the universe. Scientists were to Frost among the “heroes” of modern civilization; their “revelations” proved the ability of man to penetrate and harness matter through the mind. But as a religious man and humanist, Frost also believed there were mysteries about both matter and spirit that were beyond the reach of science. And while the methods of the physical sciences applied to matter, they could not be applied with equal validity to human nature and society because man is more than a biological animal. There is a qualitative difference between matter and human nature, most evident in the religious, moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and social values recognized or created by man. Therefore, Frost believed, science could not shape the world toward utopian ends any more than could politics.

It was the function of poetry and the arts, Frost felt, to strive for the final synthesis and unity between spirit and matter. In fact, he defined poetry as the only way mankind has of “saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of an other.” The revelations of art, as well as those of religion, transcend those of science by providing human values and meaning in the universe and in human affairs. Art’s revelations are not merely of knowledge, but include insight and love; they involve not only recognition but also response, beginning in ecstatic aesthetic pleasure and ending in calm moral wisdom. Whereas science is like a prism of light cast on a particular point of nature to reveal its laws and operations, the arts are like the sun that shines on all alike, unleashing man’s aesthetic and moral imagination upon the whole of creation.

In his social and political philosophy, Frost provided a powerful defense of the American republic through his criticism of attacks upon it by Marxists, international pacifists, and New Deal liberals. Against Marxist collectivism and the welfare state, Frost defended individual liberty as an end in itself. He rejected the rationalist politics of the Left and put his faith in the historical continuity of Western civilization, in the tested moral traditions of the Judeo-Christian religion, in classical liberal education, in the philosophical thought of such thinkers as Aristotle, Kant, Burke, and William James, and especially in the political philosophy of the founding fathers of the American republic. In his reverence for the American constitutional system, Frost was a strict constructionist.

Anglospherics Books

POSTMODERNISM IS JUST A RETURN TO PREMODERNISM:

The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien: a review of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien: Three-Volume Box Set By J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond (Michael Lucchese, 4/20/25, University Bookman)

Postmodernism is more often associated with black-turtlenecked intellectuals smoking cigarettes in Parisian cafés than tweedy Oxford dons puffing on pipes. But Gerald Russello, the late editor of The University Bookman, drew a connection between conservatism and postmodernism, especially in the thought of Russell Kirk, this publication’s founder and another of the twentieth century’s great Christian writers. He argued that Kirk’s emphasis on imagination and sentiment constituted a rejection of modern rationalism. In his book The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, Russello wrote:

Sentiment assumes a larger importance in Kirk’s work because of his assertion that the coming (post)modern age will be an Age of Sentiments, superseding the old, modern, liberal Age of Discussion. The Age of Sentiments will be more concerned with the power of image on the heart, rather than that of logical discourse on the mind. Kirk thought that rhetoric—the creation of image through language—was a critical art for conservatism to perfect. And according to Kirk, rhetoric is only effective at creating those images if it pays careful heed to the sentiments of both the speaker and the audience.

This is exactly the kind of conservative postmodernism Tolkien mastered.

The Anglosphere avoided the tragedy of Modernism, following Hume’s rejection of Reason.

Books End of History

THE NOVELIST AT THE eND OF hISTORY (profanity alert):

The Great Neoliberal Novelist (Geoff Shullenberger, April 15, 2025, Compact)

In his early career, Vargas Llosa was a left-wing radical, and he wrote Conversation in a period when he was being regularly fêted in Fidel Castro’s Havana. Yet it is clear from the moral complexity and tragic sensibility of this and other novels that he never found such answers satisfying. To be sure, he never shied away from any of the dark facts of his country’s history. For instance, The Green House (1966), the novel he wrote before Conversation, depicts the kidnapping of indigenous children by Christian missionaries and the brutally exploitative rubber trade in the Amazon. But he refused to portray Peru and Peruvians as mere victims of foreign exploitation, or as anything but the agents of their own destiny.

Given this deeply held sensibility, his break with the Latin American left was probably foreordained. Its precipitating event was what we would now call the “cancellation” of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, who in 1971 was accused by the official national writers’ union of “exalting individualism in opposition to … collective demands” and promptly jailed by Castro. This led Vargas Llosa to organize an open letter protesting Padilla’s treatment. In the aftermath, he fell out with many of his fellow writers and intellectuals, most notably with his former close friend (and eventual fellow Nobel laureate) Gabriel García Márquez.

If Vargas Llosa’s early rebellion against the stifling mores of the Peruvian haute bourgeoisie had prompted him to embrace Marxism and the Cuban Revolution, his later rejection of the groupthink of Latin American intelligentsia led him to a new set of lodestars: Popper, Hayek, and Thatcher. While the political essays that resulted from this conversion often amounted to a rehashing of “classical-liberal” nostrums, the same can’t be said of the novels that marked his neoliberal turn: The War at the End of the World (1981) and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984) number among his greatest achievements, and among the finest political fiction of the past century.

Both novels deal with failed revolutions: the first with the real historical events of the Canudos War in late 19th century Brazil, where a messianic sect of peasants revolted against the newly proclaimed republic; the second, a fictionalized version of an abortive communist revolution in 1950s Peru. Both stories expose the deep disjunction between elites and the masses in Latin America. In War at the End of the World, Brazil’s progressive reformers are shocked to find that many of the rural poor they hope to lift out of backwardness view their secular republic as a blasphemous abomination and prefer a restoration of monarchy; in Mayta, a hapless urban intellectual leads a doomed uprising of Andean peasants, in a tragicomic foreshadowing of the horrors of the Shining Path war that was tearing Peru apart as Vargas Llosa was writing the novel.

The author faced his own real-life version of the same disconnect when he ran for president of Peru in 1990. His highbrow neoliberal reformist platform, derived from his first-hand observations of Thatcher’s England and readings of Hayek and Friedman, failed to win out over the wily populist appeals of the outsider candidate Alberto Fujimori. Ironically, after his victory Fujimori went on to implement much of his rival’s proposed economic program of shock therapy and privatization, while also installing himself as dictator and engaging in staggering levels of corruption and violence. Nonetheless, decades later Fujimori retains enough of a mass following to this day that his daughter Keiko will be a leading contender in Peru’s next presidential election.

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