Brothers Judd Blog

MAGA IS UNAMERICAN:

The Grand Budapest Cartel (James M. Patterso,n April 15, 2026, Providence)

When Vice President JD Vance was campaigning for Viktor Orbán earlier this month, he was also campaigning to preserve the Hungarian funding for the New Right organizations that would support his own future political ambitions. With Orbán defeated, that money is gone. The Hungarians, in their own way, helped decide the future of American conservatism.

How is that possible? How did this happen?

The answer is the ‘Grand Budapest Cartel.’ Orbán has spent the past decade engaging in a concerted influence campaign on American conservatism. The purpose of his efforts is not merely to familiarize conservative policymakers and think-tankers with Hungarian interests. Orbán wanted to remake American conservatism from the top down into an ideological movement that moves it away from limited government, religious pluralism, and a robust foreign presence, and toward right-wing social engineering, postliberalism, and an American retreat from foreign affairs. Orbán’s ambition is not his alone but also that of Orbán’s close friends in Russia and China. In short, the meaning of the future of American conservatism was also on the ballot in the recent Hungarian elections.

TIME TO JETTISON THE DARWINIST RIGHT:

Knowing What Time It Is: What will our politics look like after Christianity? A tour of the post-religious right. (John Ehrett, March 23, 2026, Plough)

Ample evidence now suggests that post-religious conservatism is producing its own “successor ideology.” It manifests in divergent forms – from a technological maximalism that demands ever-greater transcendence of the body, to a primitivism fixated on physical strength, various imputed statistical differences between races, and (not quite ironically) phrenology. Its metrics are sets and reps, per capita statistics, and the marks on calipers. Its trajectories are complementary: they are grounded in a dawning conviction that human politics and society are fundamentally defined by biology and its resultant hierarchies. Rebelling against the body’s limits, or fixating upon them, both treat the body – rather than the immortal soul – as the primordial political term. And these moves follow organically from the dechristianization of the right.

The post-religious right will have its own creeds, however implicit. And it will inevitably find itself at odds with the Christian humanist tradition whose mantle it still claims.

By world-historical standards, American conservatism has been strikingly egalitarian in character. To many, that claim may sound outrageous, given America’s history of chattel slavery and mistreatment of Native American tribes. But by the standards of the left-right binary first formulated around the time of the French Revolution – with “left” meaning a taste for equality, and “right” an affinity for hierarchy – the American conservative experience looks decidedly nonhierarchical.

America imported no rigid system of social class from Europe. Its leaders did not, as in France, justify their rule by recourse to a sacred bloodline. Its founding authorities did not enshrine a metaphysical caste principle, along the lines of India’s ancient Laws of Manu. But Americans who claim the mantle of “conservative” – a term of preservation and stewardship – cannot escape the reality that the American tradition they conserve is bound up with the Declaration of Independence’s searing maxim: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Just who are all these men who are created equal? For many in the founding generation, black Americans, Native Americans, and others didn’t qualify. But attempts to enforce biopolitical hierarchies were always profoundly unstable. Whether consciously or not, slave owners were trapped in a paradox, committed to asserting the subhumanity of their slaves as the justification for their oppression while simultaneously living in perpetual fear of a freedom-seeking revolt – the very act of human self-determination epitomized by the Revolution itself. In time, and after much bloodshed, the logic of the Declaration won out. Those originally excluded from the American project of self-government on racial grounds proved entirely capable of being due, demanding, and receiving the rights enumerated in it.

COPING:

Cognitive dissonance helps explain why Trump supporters remain loyal, new research suggests (Eric W. Dolan, April 11, 2026, PsyPost)

A third study took place in October 2022, just after Trump was arraigned for his involvement in the January 6 Capitol attack. The scientists recruited 187 participants who had voted for Trump in the 2020 election. These individuals read an article summarizing the public hearings regarding the events of January 6.

After reading the summary, participants answered questions about how accurate they felt the information was and whether it made them feel bothered or uncomfortable. This step allowed the researchers to measure the actual emotional discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance. Participants then wrote open-ended responses explaining how they reconciled their support with reports of illegal election interference.

The results from the third study echoed the earlier findings, though participants relied even more heavily on disbelief. Over 60 percent of the respondents claimed the accusations regarding election interference and the Capitol attack were false. A small minority of participants, about 13 percent, noted that they had supported Trump in the past but no longer did so after learning about his actions.

The researchers found a positive association between feeling bothered by the news article and expressing disbelief in the allegations. Participants who experienced higher levels of mental discomfort were more likely to claim the accusations were fabricated. This suggests that the denial is not just a calm rejection of information, but rather a direct response to the psychological distress of cognitive dissonance.

From a psychological perspective, these responses represent novel ways to reduce mental friction. For instance, arguing that a politician’s personal life does not matter is a way of conceptually separating, or compartmentalizing, conflicting pieces of information. By making the personal misconduct seem completely irrelevant to political leadership, individuals can successfully eliminate their mental tension.

AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER?:

The Multipolarity Trap: How a KGB talking point became a staple of American right-wing discourse (Park MacDougald, April 07, 2026, Tablet)

At the time, this struck us as a strange argument to make at a nominally “America First” conference. Multipolarity, after all, was originally conceived by the Russian intelligence services as a tool to weaken the West. It was first formulated by Yevgeny Primakov, a KGB Arabist who served as foreign minister under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and has since been popularized internationally by the state-backed Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. In essence, multipolarity opposes “unipolar” U.S. dominance in favor of an arrangement in which Russia and its allies, China and Iran, are granted freedom of action in their respective “spheres of influence.” Over time, the idea has worked its way into the propaganda of China and Iran and the arguments of their Western sympathizers.

While phrased as an essentially defensive arrangement against American “globalism,” multipolarity is, in practice, a strategy for Communist-Islamist world domination. U.S. grand strategy since World War II is premised on the idea of “forward defense” in the Eurasian rimland, which runs from continental Europe to the Middle East and on to coastal Asia, and which is home to most of the world’s people and economic activity. Without control of the rimland, presently secured by the combination of U.S. naval power and Washington’s system of alliances, the United States would become a second-tier “hemispheric” power. For elements of the isolationist right, the appeal of being a “hemispheric” power in a “multipolar” world is no doubt that it would rule out further U.S. military entanglements in far-flung locations while allowing us to shed the costs of maintaining our “empire.” But exchanging lucrative economic and defense partnerships with Europe, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel for stronger relations with El Salvador and Peru is hardly a recipe for increasing American military power or national wealth. Instead, it would be the greatest self-own in the history of geopolitics—a recipe for making America radically poorer and less secure, and therefore subject to the dictates of more powerful countries like China. Which one suspects is the point.

In reality, it’s an ever more unipolar world.

THE RIGHT’S “METOO!”:

Identity Politics Is a Problem for Conservative Christians Too (George Yancey, 4/12/26, The Dispatch)_

Progressive identity politics led to the rise of movements such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which were more successful political endeavors than outright Marxism. Conservative political activists became aware of this relative success; consequently, it was unsurprising that Republicans such as Donald Trump tapped into some dynamics of progressive political identity to create their own form of identity politics. Whereas the left had defined racial minorities, sexual minorities, and women as oppressed groups for those promoting progressive identity politics, the right defined whites, men, and Christians as oppressed groups for those promoting conservative identity politics.

Now we have the rise of Christian identity politics. While conservative Christian activism erupted in the 1970s and has remained active, the early version of Christian identity politics did not focus on the notion of Christians as victims. Instead, it focused on implementing Christian values in the issues of abortion and sexuality. But more recently, some conservative Christians have focused on the idea of Christians as an oppressed group. Though it may seem counterintuitive, conservative Christians are not especially likely to be politically active. Indeed, they tend to lag behind the nonreligious and progressive Christians in the degree to which they participate in political activity. But some of those who have become very politically active have tapped into their own version of identity politics to motivate their political activism.