“[Conservatism] is a stool that sits on three legs…neoconservatism, libertarianism, and social, or religious, conservatism. It wasn’t that way in the early 1950s and earlier. It became that because Buckley was all three things…he really refashioned conservatism in his image,” says Carl T. Bogus, author of Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism.