Most Active Stories Sat December 17, 2011 William F. Buckley,
Father Of American Conservatism When William F. Buckley burst
onto the national scene in 1955, conservatism was a dead letter
in American politics. "Lots of people thought that it was
outdated, anachronistic, prehistoric, foolish, not very
intelligent," Carl Bogus tells weekends on All Things Considered
host Guy Raz. Bogus is the author of a new biography, called
Buckley: William F. Buckley and the Rise of American
Conservatism. He says that back in the 1950s and 1960s, there
really was an established liberal elite in America, which
controlled both political parties. Buckley set out to change
that. As a recent Yale graduate, he published a book called God
and Man at Yale, which took the university to task for failing
to promote Christianity and free market economics. "He collapsed
in that book religion, economics and political ideology," Bogus
says, producing the mix of ideas we recognize today as
conservatism: free-market capitalism, support for A