The Bozell Imprisonment

From Leo to Zeeker in four generations, guys named L. Brent Bozell built movement conservatism, then guided it into fanaticism, then cynicism, then abject thuggery.

The great Washington Post writer Henry Allen has written eloquently about America’s plague of WASP rot, an ingenious phrase coined by his friend and former Post colleague Abigail Trafford:

My ancestors arrived early in North America, founded towns, fought at Bunker Hill, built railroads and cornered markets. But that day was long done when I was growing up. We were not unusual — in so many families, the money had been made, the money had been spent. What made these families exceptional, the way America is exceptional, is that they believed that standards had to be maintained at all costs, a moral obligation, even though there never seemed to be much difference between the material and the moral.

What ails these Episcopalian grandees?

It’s WASP rot. They drop out of the country club. The drinking eases the pain. They don’t pull Ted out of college; he quits and says he wants to be a chef. The daughter ends up living with a jazz musician who beats her. It’s as if they, and the United States, have lost their luck.

Wealth, grandeur, dissipation. It’s a very old story. And now it’s happened to a dynasty that can plausibly claim to be movement conservatism’s founding family. According to an FBI affidavit, on the afternoon of Jan. 6 L. Brent Bozell IV, known to his friends as “Zeeker,”

was on the balcony of the U.S. Senate Chamber and walked around the Senate Floor. Based on the timestamps of the C -SPAN video footage, the individual identified as Bozell was in the U.S. Senate Chamber from at least 2:46 p.m. through 2:55 p.m. on January 6, 2021. While on the U.S. Senate Chamber Balcony, the man identified as Bozell moved a camera so that the camera was pointing down to the ground ofthe balcony area. This was done as protestors began to enter the main floor of the U.S. Senate. By pointing the camera to ground, the camera was unable to record protestors entering the main floor of the U.S. Senate Chamber.

As his name indicates, Zeeker is fourth in a line of guys named L. Brent Bozell who put Father Edward J. Flanagan’s Boys Town on the map, created the conservative movement with the founding of National Review, ghostwrote Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of A Conservative, defeated four liberal Senate giants in the 1980 election, and paved the way for Donald Trump to dismiss mainstream journalism as “fake news.” WASP rot—or perhaps we should say Catholic rot, since the second and most brilliant L. Brent Bozell abandoned Episcopalianism for Catholicism—made its first appearance in L. Brent Bozell III before devouring entirely L. Brent Bozell IV. In the Bozell dynasty we see conservatism rise from capitalist prosperity to intellectual fervor to ideological fanaticism to crude and hypocritical manipulation and finally to thuggish and violent insurrection. There ought to be a miniseries.

Instead, there’s my latest New Republic column, which runs a bit longer than usual because, well, family sagas tend to sprawl, and this one is chock-filled with good parts. It’s a story as big and bold as the Reagan Revolution. Please read it here.