Cormac McCarthy’s celebrated anti-Western novel, 1985’s Blood Meridian, diagrams a philosophy that treats living beings as raw material, resulting in atrocity. Its pessimistic world offers less a case for an inherently vicious, universal human nature than an anatomy of a mentality now thriving in plain sight: everyday fascism.
No one speaks in Blood Meridian, at least not in the conventional literary sense as indicated by proper punctuation; “dialogue” blends with prose, creating an almost subliminal intrusion in the reader’s mind. Men from “another time” ride a borderless world that contains creatures “more horrible” than any they have yet seen; the land itself seems ancient enough to smoke from millennial fires. Welcome to a harrowing vision of the Wild West in the 1840s.
In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy gives us not so much characters of flesh and blood as concatenations of rain, mud, and grit-laden wind. The Kid – half-formed, brutalized, and cruel – drifts among scalp hunters who harvest Indigenous bodies the way prospectors harvest ore. Indeed, the plot is stark, the narration omniscient, the figures often grotesque. Yet the story’s great feat lies elsewhere; it appears to be sketching an anthropology in which violence is an inherent property of human behavior, as fundamental as eating and sleeping.
Cormac McCarthy’s Diagnosis
The reader bears witness to a hypnotic journey across the desert, where History is stripped bare, nature is exalted, and deeds take precedence over thoughts or feelings. Blood Meridian‘s drawn-out narrative cadence, with few recognizable character arcs, can be excruciating.
Cormac McCarthy’s famously laconic, biblical diction – with dialogue that is welded into narration and punctuation that is pared to the bone – creates that paradoxical feeling of claustrophobia in wide-open country, where existential horror constitutes Creation’s raw material. Then, as if to counter the staccato glare, the long, cadenced sentences arrive: panoramic, paratactic, overflowing with lyric detail.
Out of this alternation, the novel builds a world in which the frontier never ends and the open horizon is a ruse for bloodshed and conquest. If style is argument, McCarthy’s prose argues that space without limits tilts toward ethics without bounds.
Blood Meridian’s Instrument of Fascist Reason
Enter Judge Holden: a hairless, terrifying polymath, incarnating Enlightenment Reason. The Judge studies and catalogs the natural world. This is not to wonder at nature, but to own it and then destroy its fragments. What he cannot inventory, he declares illusion; what he can, he subjugates.
Holden is the apostle of modern disenchantment who says, in effect, that mysteries are merely failures of measurement (“Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”). It is no accident that he sustains a constant, simmering dispute with the former priest Tobin – embodiment of the defeated premodern cultural condition – and has engraved upon his gun the memento mori motto Et in Arcadia Ego.
He manipulates language and, through it, the interpretation of “objective” events. He argues that war is humankind’s truest form of divination. If power is the right to decide what may live and what must die, the Judge is Power in the saddle. Through Holden, the modern West is arraigned as a civilization built on delusions and more lethal than the sum of its parts.
Critics have read Holden as many things: a demon, a parody of modernity, negation made flesh. What matters here is how perfectly he embodies a broader, modern logic: the reduction of living beings to mere instruments, to cogs in a vast machine. He carries a ledger, and he lives by it. He names, and in naming, he consumes.
Blood Meridian‘s Journey through Human-Created Hell
The story’s parodic postmodern touches – its knowingly inflated frontier myth, its sardonic undermining of Anglo heroic lore, its literary dismantling of the West’s “Center” (cultural, ideological, anthropological) in favor of a “Periphery” – sharpen rather than soften this point. Blood Meridian does not simply deconstruct the Western; it rebuilds the myth on its hidden premise that people, lands, animals, and histories can be rendered as stock to be traded, spent, and depleted.
Cormac McCarthy borrowed from historical sources: scalp bounties, extermination campaigns, and militias made legal by convenience. The novel’s anti-heroic frontier is a recognition of suppressed past realities. Under the banner of “destiny”, an economy of land-grabs and mineral dreams required a continuous downgrading of Indigenous life.
Genocide here is less a singular “event” than a sustained administrative outlook: classify, clear, extract. The Judge’s field notes are the reported deliverables of that outlook, and the gang’s ride is its logistics.
It is tempting to cordon all this off as premodern savagery that the 20th century transcended. Blood Meridian will not allow it. It’s very form–linear, episodic, and austere – insists that repetition itself is the structure. One valley resembles the last, one massacre the next; the underlying logic remains firmly in place, even as the frontier “moves”. Continuity – up to the present day – is the subtlest horror the story offers.
In Cormac McCarthy’s telling, a savage impulse endures across time and space. Perhaps this is his reason for treating such a philosophy as ubiquitous. In exploring this root, he casts human malice as a fundamental force of nature, in starkly Hobbesian terms of a universal war of all against all. The introductory refrain of “eyes locked in their cages”, together with the later remark that the protagonists have no more fellowship than a troop of monkeys, sums up this worldview of people as isolated psychic islands. The recurrent scenes of morbid violence and horror – firmly in the realm of the grotesque and staged like inventive splatter-film set pieces – underline the consequences of interactions among such individuals.
It is true that the author’s insistence on a faithful recounting of real events detracts from Blood Meridian‘s momentum, for it turns the story’s central trunk into a patchwork of outlandish set pieces and an endless succession of repetitive episodes, from most of which the protagonist is practically absent as an active agent. Even so, that impression recedes in the novel’s final third, as McCarthy at last ends the experiment of narrating mere deeds without developing characters. The Kid is drawn in greater depth, with the first traces of a moral code beginning to shape his behavior. The plot accelerates, and Judge Holden emerges, plainly, as a near-demonic counterweight to the protagonist and to any claim of free will.
Fused with the landscape, Hoden embodies a bleak view of human nature, a stance that appears to go decisively beyond Hobbesian anthropology. The novel appears to be treating the individual’s supposed innate bent toward violence not as the inevitable outcome of a “rational” bid for self-preservation and the maximization of personal power in the state of nature. It is, in this telling, an inescapable trait etched into our very essence.
That trait is dramatized in a grim, quasi-religious parable in which the material world and civilization embody Evil; the ultimate prison of the tragic human captive, who harbors violence as both a fundamental instinct and a way of life. Thus, the genocide of the Indigenous population is laid bare, yet they are not portrayed as innocent victims of the white settlers; the same germ afflicts their souls as well. This is indeed true to historical fact: Native Americans also perpetrated atrocities such as torture, raids, or attacks on civilians, in ways occasionally proactive or embedded in their political, economic, and ritual systems – not solely as a response to the actions of the European colonists.
Yet, Cormac McCarthy frames this observation in a very particular manner, as if to claim that Western modernity is revealed as just one instance of a universal, inherent human tendency toward brutality. It is well concealed by illusions of its own making, in the guise of high culture and humanism.
In Blood Meridian‘s epilogue, three decades later, the Kid’s brave and definitive rejection of the Judge seems to end in an obscure, implied ruin, with the latter claiming, metaphorically, the central place in the endless dance of war and life. His triumph is inevitable, his reign everlasting; the author’s thinking is desperately dark. Situated at the intersection of the classical liberal and conservative traditions, Blood Meridian articulates with clarity the banality at its core: the myth of a universal, selfish, malevolent human nature – that fleeting specter of a secularized Original Sin – by which every hierarchical order has for centuries justified and shored itself up.
Judge Holden Rides On and On
What if Cormac McCarthy was wrong? Not in his observations, but in his reasoning. What if the root cause of this hellscape is not a spectral, supposedly essential, and inescapable human nature, but fascism’s core as expressed in everyday life?
This is not about fascism’s historically determined structural building blocks, or surface characteristics: not the party platform, the populist rhetoric, the revisionary but rigid social hierarchy, the autocratic and authoritarian form of government, the corporatist state, or the militaristic salute. It is about fascism’s inner mentality, which existed long before the historical far-right movements: a contingent instrumental metaphysics that stands at the far pole of Enlightenment humanism, viewing life as nothing more than a mundane resource for achieving tribal economic gains.
The fact that high-level fascist ideology puts that mentality in the service of a greater nationalist myth of collective power and rebirth through the state is irrelevant here. It is the low-level mindset that is of interest to everyday life. Dehumanization is central to this worldview. The fascist regimes of the interwar period were obsessed with maximizing national industrial output, demanding that people serve these “objective” priorities as mere tools. Although in McCarthy’s desert the state is still embryonic and capital is crude, the concept is already present, stamped into the gait of men who kill because the world, as they perceive it, demands to be used materially as much as possible.
In the 21st century, Judge Holden’s mentality is everywhere if one knows how to read. Consider the economy of “essential” work. Across Southern Europe and the United States, low-wage migrants harvest fruit, clean rooms, slaughter poultry, and pour concrete. When they are healthy and their labor is cheap, the system calls them “necessary”, yet oppresses and degrades them with racist remarks, while targeting them as a demographic “threat”, to minimize their labor costs. The immigrants are welcomed as laboring bodies, but not as human beings of equal value to the natives.
When they are injured, ill, or undocumented, the same system treats them as externalities to be expelled. One horrific case in 2024, for example, saw an Indian farmworker in Italy, Satnam Singh, lose his arm in a packing machine; instead of getting help, he was dumped on a roadside by his employer and left to bleed to death.
Similarly, during the first Trump administration in the United States, hardline policies and rhetoric explicitly dehumanized Latin American migrants, branding them “rapists” and “invaders”, separating thousands of children from parents, caging families in detention camps, and even denying detainees basic hygiene. As investigators documented, guards called them “apes” and “baboons”, taunting and abusing them with impunity.
This mentality is not confined to racist, right-wing ideologues. In recent years, ostensibly apolitical “ordinary” citizens, such as small-business owners, have quietly welcomed the prospect of large immigrant flows – driven by catastrophes in the Global South – that push down wages in the Global North. At the same time, they treat as objective fact imagined narratives casting far-right vigilante militias as guardians against “migrant criminality”.
Of course, these non-ideologues are not solely defined by their stance on immigration. They are likely the kind of lower-middle-class bargain-hunters of the housing bust, who viewed mass foreclosures after 2008 as a cut-rate path to homeownership, combing bank auctions for seized houses amid widespread despair.
In short, today’s borders throughout the world accomplish what bounties once did in America: they assign differing degrees of disposability to bodies performing the same labor. The rhetoric is cleaner now, the paperwork thicker, but Judge Holden would still feel at home in modern America.
The point is not to flatten distinctions between institutions, eras, and regimes. It is to notice that instrumentalization scales with ease, using a common rhetoric of expendability. While it may not wear the jackboots of a formal fascist regime, this mundane cruelty is, at heart, nothing more than everyday fascism.
Stemming from the repudiation of universal human dignity, in service of the macroeconomic goals of relatively privileged actors, everyday fascism elevates the spreadsheet to an all-encompassing worldview, one that can erode empathy long before anyone reaches for a weapon.
Whole communities become input variables in supply chains that chew and churn, their lives valued largely to the extent they keep shelves stocked and prices low. “War is God”, says Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden; in the warehouse age, efficiency is granted a similar license.
Everyday Fascism’s Bureaucracy, Nation, and Militia
Then there are 21st-century wars and their far-reaching rhetoric, such as Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war against Ukraine. In the Israel-Gaza conflict, spurred by Hamas’ horrific Nova Music Festival Massacre and hostage-taking, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government uses dehumanizing speech, mass bombardment, targeting of civilians, deliberate starvation, and the systematic throttling of civilian infrastructure (already weakened by Hamas). These actions are defended as necessities in the service of Israel’s “security” aims. The result has been the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, fueling both islamophobia and antisemitism across the world.
Whatever one’s politics, the language of expendability in this example has been hard to miss: whole neighborhoods cast as acceptable collateral, an entire population of millions addressed as obstacle rather than as citizenry with claims. It does not ask who these people are; it asks what they can do for the plan. If the answer is “nothing” – or worse, they obstruct the “objective” – the moral column zeros out. When policymakers argue that such devastation is not regrettable but required, the Judge’s philosophy has entered the briefing room.
It is not difficult to see the similarities with how Indigenous territories were annexed to the United States, under implicit economic motives of resource expropriation. The infamous “Trump Gaza” video, initially intended as satirical but seemingly adopted by U.S. President Trump in February 2025, foregrounded these similarities in a manner both vulgar and terrifying. After all, as historians note, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny held that American settlers had a providential mission to occupy and exploit the continent for the development of “liberty” and economic growth.
By the end of the so-called Indian Wars in the late 19th century, the North American Indigenous population had plummeted to fewer than 238,000 from an estimated 5-10 million people pre-contact. Native Americans were either forced to assimilate, penned into reservations, or simply massacred, with the moral horror cloaked in appeals to economic benefits and a twisted civilizing mission.
Echoes of that persist. As the US government explicitly adopted policies of displacement and extermination (e.g., the Indian Removal Act of 1830, authorizing the mass relocation of tribes to free up land for white settlers), today’s Israeli government plans to take over Gaza City. Critics argue that top Israeli leaders openly describe their enemies in subhuman terms, with the defense minister referring to Palestinians as “human animals” and officials calling for “total annihilation” in Gaza.
Blood Meridian prepares us to hear this. A century and a half after the novel’s timeframe, Cormac McCarthy’s riders move as if deputized by a purpose whose origin is lost, and, conjoined, they form a new creature with a single will. Bureaucracy, nation, militia: the essence stays the same.
Landscape as Blood Meridian‘s Brutal Protagonist
One of Cormac McCarthy’s subtlest achievements is to make the terrain itself Blood Meridian‘s most vivid character. The desert is not mere backdrop but argument: a place so pitiless it appears to advocate for the Judge’s worldview, as if Earth had chosen a side.
Volcanic flats that scorch a palm like meat, horizons that recede as if ordained to taunt the pilgrim: “They rode through sunlight and high grass and in the late afternoon they came out upon an escarpment that seemed to rim the known world. Below them in the paling light smoldered the plains of San Agustin stretching away to the northeast, the earth floating off in a long curve silent under looms of smoke from the underground coal deposits burning there a thousand years.”
This charnel ground, recalling earlier literary renderings of Hell, is more than a set of images. The landscape is the novel’s central pillar and its theological stage, on which civilization and nature collude to tell one story: that life is trapped in matter and the law of the trap is violence.
Read in 2025, that stage looks less allegorical than predictive. We inherit landscapes shaped by method: deserts manufactured by policy (bombed-out grids), by economics (company towns of debt), and by climate (fire and flood). In each, living beings become resources to be routed, priced, and extracted.
Cormac McCarthy’s refusal to give us conventional character “development” in most of Blood Meridian is part of this same argument. If you want interiority, the novel seems to be saying, try another civilization. Here, only acts count. For acts are what can be measured by metrics of loss and profit.
Judge Holden’s Judgement
At the end of Blood Meridian, the Judge seems to win. That any resistance registers at all – that the Kid might turn from the dance – keeps the novel from becoming the Judge’s gospel. It remains, instead, a theodicy without a god, an indictment of a world in which the dominant narrative is one of utility for the strong.
If fascism’s inner essence is the anti-humanist view of living beings as disposable instruments, then Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is its field manual and warning. The work anatomizes the allure of this philosophy so precisely that we can learn how to reject it. The rejection, however, cannot be merely sentimental.
Humanism’s confidence in the “grandeur and dignity” of the person needs to be translated for an age of databases and drones. Dignity must now be engineered into systems: labor protections that refuse to create disposable classes; fair-hiring rules that de-weaponize immigration status; media architectures that starve cruelty of profit; and the enforcement of wartime rules that treat civilian life not as a constraint to be gamed, but as a fundamental principle.
The Judge insists the dance is eternal. “He will never die”, Blood Meridian nearly says. Perhaps. After all, the violence of a settler militia clearing a frontier and the insidious neglect of a refugee left to drown at sea stem from the same poisonous root.
As a large percentage of 19th-century US policy-makers were essentially in favor of ethnic cleansing, today there is no shortage of quirky small-time politicians, media figures, lawyers, diplomats, entrepreneurs, or journalists who act in an ominously familiar manner. They may propagate the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, or slyly use dismissive language against grassroots movements of solidarity to the weak and the oppressed; thus, rhetorically treating them in public as loopy, fringe cults, unworthy of serious attention.
Yet, even Cormac McCarthy’s indictment is written on a page, and pages can be turned. The quarrel continues wherever readers choose the Kid’s faltering “no” over the Judge’s fluent “yes”. In the archives of American myth, Blood Meridian is that rare thing: a novel that tells the truth about a founding violence without aestheticizing consent to it.
The desert, after all, is not just a place. It is a policy, a habit, a mode of perceiving reality. If we can see it, we can refuse to ride with it. If a fascist metaphysics lies at its core, instead of an immutable, universal human nature, it is in our hands to change it.
That is the fresh task Blood Meridian sets for a culture that still mistakes endless horizons for freedom: to disbelieve the Judge, to re-enchant the world not with superstition but with solidarity, and to rebuild – from one fragile body to the next – a system of values in which living beings are ends once more.