By Stephanie Slade
Monday, August 31, 2026
Note: This article is adapted from Fusionism:
Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right
***
It is impossible to discuss L. Brent Bozell Jr. without
making reference to his more famous friend, William F. Buckley Jr. The two were
debate partners at Yale in the late 1940s. They became brothers-in-law when
Bozell married one of Buckley’s sisters. A few years later they co-authored a
book together. And Bozell was there on the masthead in 1955 when Buckley
founded National Review.
But Bozell is best remembered today, to the extent he is
remembered, for the intensity with which he broke from his brother-in-law’s
magazine and the brand of “fusionist” conservatism it represented. In 1966, he
left National Review to start a rival publication, Triumph—a
“radical Christian” journal that grew ever more radical over the course of its
10-year run. He was really “a kind of proto-integralist,” the historian George
Nash told me, referring to the modern faction of Catholic radicals with ties to
Vice President J.D. Vance.
Vance and his fellow “postliberals” could learn a thing
or two from the trajectory their forerunner followed.
Bozell began his career as a champion of individual
liberty. In 1959, he accepted a commission to ghostwrite The Conscience of a
Conservative for Barry Goldwater, a rising star on the right. The slim
book—which shocked everyone by becoming a bestseller and propelling the Arizona
senator to the GOP presidential nomination four years later—became something of
a bible for believers in limited government. And it’s safe to say the volume
reflected the views of its true author at least as much as those of the man
whose name was on the cover. A friend tellingly described it as “an accurate
distillation of Goldwater’s past statements and speeches liberally spiked with
pure 200-proof Bozell.”
Yet Bozell’s outlook soon began to sour. A Catholic
convert, his religious views grew increasingly dogmatic and illiberal.
Goldwater-style small-government politics started to bore him; he questioned
whether freedom was really worth dedicating one’s life to.
His restlessness was typified by a decision Bozell made
to move his family, a wife and eight young children, to a remote village in
Spain in the early 1960s during the Francisco Franco dictatorship. That
“half-historical, half-mythical Spain of conquistadors and mystics, crusaders
and missionaries” called to him, wrote his biographer, Daniel Kelly. Once
there, he drank in the sense that a different approach to politics was
possible.
Bozell’s writing reflected the changes he was undergoing.
In the early 1960s, a National Review senior editor named Frank Meyer
had begun characterizing American conservatism as a glorious “fusion” of the
traditionalist and libertarian streams of thought. Once, not very long ago,
Bozell would have found nothing to object to in that formulation. But the
Bozell who now sent in his contributions to National Review from Spain
was no longer the man who had penned the Goldwater manifesto. “He was now an
ultraconservative throne-and-altar Catholic,” wrote Sam Tanenhaus in his
long-awaited Buckley biography, “convinced salvation could be reached by only
one route: the recovery of the pre-Enlightenment ideal of the Christian West.”
Bozell’s dissatisfaction spilled into view with “Freedom
or Virtue?,” one of the longest essays in National Review history. The
piece, a direct attack on Meyer’s worldview, was summed up in its final line:
“The story of how the free society has come to take priority over the good
society is the story of the decline of the West,” Bozell averred.
Like many on today’s postliberal right, he had come to
reject the idea that government’s role should be strictly limited to protecting
life, liberty, and property, mocking that position as “the mystery of the
trinitarian state.” He now believed that government was an “instrument” that
could be used to reduce the frequency of occasions for sin. If the state made
it harder to legally obtain a divorce, fewer people would be tempted to abandon
their spouses; if the state prohibited businesses from operating on Sundays,
fewer people would be tempted to skip church.
Too much political freedom enabled vice. “So viewed,
freedom is hardly a blessing,” Bozell wrote. “If individual man is to have any
hope of conforming with his nature, he needs all of the help he can get.”
In the years that followed, Bozell’s views grew more
fanatical. He had long labored on what he promised would be a two-volume work
on how the Supreme Court went astray under Chief Justice Earl Warren. But by
the time publication day for the first book rolled around, he had already grown
tired of it. “Not only did the new Brent fail to write the book’s promised
second volume; in February 1968, less than a year and a half after the first
volume’s publication, he repudiated the entire work on religious grounds,”
Kelly wrote. Shockingly, “he had come to realize that the Constitution had
never possessed legitimacy. A product of the liberal mentality of an earlier
age, it vested final authority not in God, from whom all genuine authority
flowed … but in ‘the people.’” This made the Constitution almost blasphemous,
in Bozell’s view.
The same year The Warren Revolution was published,
Bozell departed National Review to found Triumph. The new
magazine was initially greeted with excitement among conservative Catholics.
Over time, though, it gained a reputation for “expressing ‘extreme’ opinions in
‘extreme’ language and calling for ‘extreme’ action to achieve its ends,”
according to Kelly. It appeared to embrace theocracy, urging the Catholic
Church to “forthrightly acknowledge that a state of war exists between herself
and the American political order” and arguing against capitalism on the grounds
that “socialism with its slave-labor camps is hardly a worse system than one
that allows the free exchange of money for goods and services which include
[the pornographic film] Deep Throat.”
“My father questioned whether America was salvageable,”
Bozell’s son L. Brent Bozell III told me. By the early 1970s, he had “even
accepted the New Left fashion of spelling America with a k instead
of a c,” Kelly wrote.
Bozell’s economic views also took a collectivist turn. He
now felt that free markets were at odds with a society’s obligations to the
common good. Later, he would express support for “government policies that, in
effect, impose ‘compulsory self-denial’ on the rest of us in order to help the
poor.”
These changes put a strain on his relationship with
Buckley. Some observers wondered if that wasn’t the point: Bozell seemed
desperate to escape his brother-in-law’s shadow, and one friend suggested that
a simmering jealousy manifested in “root-and-branch attacks on America” that
“he thought would cause Buckley pain.”
If founding Triumph was meant to show that he,
too, could succeed where Buckley had, the results were mixed at best. Readers
were turned off by the editors’ increasingly anti-American bent. Subscription
numbers declined and the magazine struggled along, in or near the red, for just
under a decade before shuttering.
Kelly pointed to Bozell’s periodic “explosions” at
Buckley (as well as “the grandiose fantasies he entertained—converting the
American people en masse to Catholicism” and “bringing the world under the
scepter of Christ the King”) as possible manic episodes. Indeed, not long after
closing down his magazine, Bozell was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
The disease took a brutal toll. To say that Bozell’s
behavior during this period was bizarre doesn’t do justice to the reality. He
injured himself repeatedly and suffered “spells of delusion.” He would
disappear without warning only to turn up in a hospital or jail cell, sometimes
in a foreign country. He was once arrested in Northern Ireland for
commandeering a public bus when he couldn’t find a taxi, Kelly wrote, and “came
to believe that he was the pope and simultaneously the commandant in chief of the
IRA.” He struggled with alcoholism; debt accumulated.
Eventually—almost miraculously—Bozell and his loved ones
did manage to get his illness under control. And at the tail end of his life,
there’s a lesson that may have applications to conservative politics today. He
was “shattered, physically and mentally,” said Brent III. “When he died at age
71, he looked 91. But he came out of it, ultimately, in this state of grace
that was astonishing. He became truly a holy man.”
Bozell all but gave up politics completely. He spent his
time visiting prison inmates, serving food at soup kitchens, and attending
daily Mass at a monastery in northeast Washington, D.C. “Gaunt, stooped … it
could be hard to tell him from the people he aided,” Kelly wrote. “Yet year
after year, he managed to keep limping along, held up by the will to bestow and
receive mercy.”
Bozell died in April 1997. He is remembered fondly by
many movement conservatives as the man who made the strongest intellectual
challenge to Meyer’s fusionist arguments—a challenge that has found new
resonance among postliberal thinkers and activists today. But in the end,
despite the recurring challenges they faced, fusionist ideas put down roots on
the American right in the second half of the 20th century. Even
Bozell eventually conceded that his rival’s ideas had “become the de facto
consensus” among American conservatives.
In fact, one could squint and argue that Bozell’s life
(if not his ideology) embodied the fusionist ethos. Fusionism, after all, says
that social problems are better solved through voluntary cooperation via civil
society institutions rather than by wielding the coercive power of the state.
Bozell may have come to believe that government can and should play an active
role in addressing the loss of virtue in American culture, but he was also a
consummate institution builder and social entrepreneur who was forever rolling
up his sleeves and starting new projects with a goal of doing something about
society’s problems himself.
In 1966, Bozell launched his magazine. In 1970, he
founded an “apostolate” that included a film production company and direct-mail
outfit to promote Christian values through the media, as well as a Catholic
“summer school” in Spain that lives on today as Virginia’s Christendom College.
In 1971—foreshadowing the “Benedict Option” promoted by the journalist Rod
Dreher in recent years—Bozell began encouraging faithful Catholics to secede
from modern America and form traditionalist communes with like-minded families.
He later founded a group called Misión Guadalupe to aid and evangelize poor
Hispanic immigrants to the United States.
When Meyer urged people not to assume it was the state’s
job to solve their problems and instead called for “the imaginative exercise of
voluntary altruistic effort to restore a widespread sense of responsibility for
social well-being and to guard against moral degradation of citizens,” he
probably wasn’t thinking of his old National Review colleague. But
ironically, Bozell’s experience gives us an excellent example of what an
imaginative exercise of voluntary altruism can look like in practice.
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