The great fusionist project of ordered liberty advocated by Frank Meyer, William F. Buckley, and M. Stanton Evans is defended and affirmed today by a group calling themselves Freedom Conservatives, or FreeCons. And as most groups of conservatives are wont to do, they have drafted a Statement of Principles outlining what they hope to affirm. Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is a proud signatory on this statement and welcomes in this episode one of the two originators of the Statement, Avik Roy, for a wide-ranging discussion on fusionism, how FreeCons may compare and contrast with NatCons, the need for conservatism to grapple with issues of equality, and much more.

About Avik Roy

Excerpts from https://bipartisanpolicy.org/person/avik-roy/

Avik Roy is the President of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP.org), a non-partisan, non-profit think tank that conducts original research on expanding opportunity to those who least have it. Roy's work has been praised widely on both the right and the left. National Review has called him one of the nation's "sharpest policy minds," while the New York Times' Paul Krugman described him as man of "personal and moral courage."

Roy has advised three presidential candidates on policy, including Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney. Roy also serves as the Opinion Editor at Forbes, where he writes on politics and policy, and manages The Apothecary, the influential Forbes blog on health care policy and entitlement reform. [He] is the author of How Medicaid Fails the Poor, published by Encounter Books in 2013, and Transcending Obamacare: A Patient-Centered Plan for Near-Universal Coverage and Permanent Fiscal Solvency, a second edition of which was published in 2016 by FREOPP. He serves on the advisory board of the National Institute for Health Care Management, is a Senior Advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center, and co-chaired the Fixing Veterans Health Care Policy Taskforce.

Roy's writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Atlantic, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and National Affairs, among other publications. He is a frequent guest on television news programs, including appearances on Fox News, Fox Business, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, CBS, PBS, and HBO.

From 2011 to 2016, Roy served as a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where he conducted research on the Affordable Care Act, entitlement reform, universal coverage, international health systems, and FDA policy. Previously, he served as an analyst and portfolio manager at Bain Capital, J.P. Morgan, and other firms.

Roy was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied molecular biology, and the Yale University School of Medicine. You can follow Roy on Twitter @Avik