The MAGA New Right

L. Brent Bozell Jr.

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L. Brent Bozell Jr. (1926–1997)

Yale-educated Catholic convert; brother-in-law and Yale roommate of William F. Buckley Jr.; ghostwriter of Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative (1960); co-author with Buckley of McCarthy and His Enemies (1954); founder and editor of the traditionalist Catholic journal Triumph (1966–1976); the figure in postwar American conservatism who argued, as early as 1962, the position now associated with Catholic Integralism and Postliberalism — that the purpose of politics is not freedom but virtue, and that “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.”

Why He Matters Here

Bozell is the wiki’s most important early example of the move the MAGA New Right now makes openly: rejecting fusionist proceduralism in the name of a “Christian civilization” politics that uses state power for substantive moral ends. He made this argument in 1962, against Frank Meyer’s fusionism, when the conservative movement was just consolidating. He lost the intramural argument; the movement consolidated around fusionism; Bozell’s strain went underground in Triumph and Catholic-traditionalist circles. The strain reemerged six decades later as Deneen’s, Vermeule’s, and Ahmari’s Postliberalism.

Bozell is the direct precursor of contemporary postliberalism. Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism is unintelligible without him. The Postliberal Order Substack and First Things’s “strong gods” mode are restating Bozell’s 1962 position with the institutional confidence Bozell never had.

Career

  • Yale Law School graduate. Buckley’s college roommate; married Buckley’s sister Patricia.
  • Speechwriter for Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Co-authored, with Buckley, McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning (1954) — a defense of McCarthy that defined the NR circle’s combative anti-communism.
  • Ghostwriter of The Conscience of a Conservative (1960). Goldwater’s name is on the cover; the prose, structure, and Catholic-natural-law-inflected framing are Bozell’s. The book sold 3.5 million copies and became the most influential political manifesto of the postwar American right.
  • Critic of fusionism. In a 1962 NR essay (covered by Lee Edwards’s The Conservative Consensus) Bozell argued: “the purpose of politics… is not the promotion of freedom but the promotion of virtue and the building of ‘a Christian civilization.’ 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.” This is the first articulation in the postwar conservative movement of the position Patrick Deneen would systematize in Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Adrian Vermeule in Common Good Constitutionalism (2022).
  • Conversion to Catholicism in the late 1950s; became increasingly traditionalist.
  • Lived in Franco’s Spain in the late 1950s/early 1960s with his Yale teacher Willmoore Kendall. Per Iberian Vistas (Zúquete & Hawley, 2025), the Spanish residence was formative — both Bozell and Kendall returned more committed to substantively Catholic political theory and less committed to Buckley/Meyer fusionism. Bozell’s Triumph program is recognizably an attempt to import the Spanish-Catholic-traditionalist political-theological synthesis to America.
  • Founded Triumph magazine (1966). Explicitly Catholic-traditionalist, anti-fusionist, anti-Vatican II. Sustained admirer of António Salazar (the Estado Novo corporatist Catholic regime; Triumph covered Salazar repeatedly) and Franco. Bozell led an action where Triumph staff stormed an abortion clinic, the kind of “use the body, witness in the streets” politics that prefigures Ahmari’s confrontational mode. Triumph folded in 1976.
  • Spent his last decades in mental and physical decline; never returned to the political mainstream.

The 1962 Bozell-Meyer Debate

The intramural quarrel Edwards summarizes is the founding split in postwar American conservatism:

  • Frank Meyer’s fusionism said: traditionalists and libertarians can coexist because individual freedom is the means to virtuous life; coerced virtue isn’t virtue. The state’s role is minimal.
  • Bozell’s reply said: this gets the relationship between freedom and virtue exactly backwards. Politics aims at the good life. The good is prior to the free. Christian civilization is the substantive end politics should pursue. Fusionism is the disease, not the cure.

Meyer won that round. Fusionism became the consensus framework for the next thirty years. But the argument never closed. Triumph held the position; the older First Things (under Neuhaus) softened it; the new postliberal generation revived it.

The wiki’s structural reading: Bozell lost in 1962 because the Cold War cement still held. Once anti-communism was no longer available as the “cement of fusionism” (Edwards’s phrase), the libertarian-traditionalist gap Bozell identified opened back up. Postliberalism is Bozell vindicated.

What the New Right Does Not Acknowledge

Almost no contemporary postliberal writer credits Bozell as a precursor. The Postliberal Order founders (Vermeule, Deneen, Pappin, Pecknold) trace their lineage through Vatican II–era and post-Vatican II Catholic theology, MacIntyre, and selectively Schmitt; they treat their position as a new response to the failure of fusionism rather than the resurrection of an old position fusionism defeated. This is partly tactical — Bozell’s Triumph-era reputation (anti-Vatican II, abortion-clinic raids, mental illness in his last decades) makes him an awkward ancestor — and partly genuine ignorance.

The wiki preserves the lineage as one of its sharper findings: the 2010s–2020s postliberal turn is substantively Bozell’s 1962 position, made institutionally viable by the post-1991 collapse of fusionism’s anti-communist cement.

Cross-References

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