The importance of William F. Buckley Jr. to conservative thought in the second half of the twentieth century cannot be overstated. Before Buckley burst onto the scene in the 1950s, American conservatism was almost completely moribund. Conservatism at that time wasn’t a movement at all—it was a frayed rope, with strands of anti-communism, religious morality, and libertarianism protruding out from an unwinding center.
That’s where William F. Buckley came in. Buckley was a true intellectual in the classical sense: he was a man of ideas. He was a thinker who shaped his world and brought others to conservatism through his writings and his example. By the end of his life in 2008, the New York Times proclaimed that Buckley’s “greatest achievement was making conservatism—not just electoral Republicanism but conservatism as a system of ideas—respectable in liberal post–World War II America.” Buckley made conservatism respectable, but he also helped move conservatism from the realm of ideas into a viable political movement.
In this essay, David Keene, one of the chief spokesmen for conservative principles and politics, lays out his friend Bill Buckley’s key philosophies—the philosophies that undergird the three-legged stool of conservatism and continue to animate conservatism today. Keene was a personal friend of both Buckley and his brother, and an eyewitness to the development of the postwar movement at whose center Buckley stood. Keene is vital to the history of the conservative movement; his personal experience provides a unifying field theory of modern conservatism.
David A. Keene is the opinion editor of the Washington Times. From 2011 to 2013, he served as president of the National Rifle Association, and remains on the board and executive council. He also serves on the boards of the Constitution Project and the Center for the National Interest and is a founding member of Right on Crime, a conservative criminal justice reform organization. From 1982 to 2011, Keene was the elected chairman of the American Conservative Union, and remains on the board. Keene also served as the national chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, editor of the oldest conservative student journal in the country, a John F. Kennedy Fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, a First Amendment Fellow at Vanderbilt University’s Freedom Forum, and on the board of visitors at Duke University’s Public Policy School. Keene is married to Donna Wiesner Keene, a Senior Fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, and has five conservative children.