After World War II, Bill Buckley, Frank Meyer, and others assembled the “three-legged stool” of modern American conservatism: free markets, anti-communism, and cultural conservatism. It was a synthesis that elected Ronald Reagan and won the Cold War. But that synthesis is fraying, because cultural conservatism itself has diverging strains that came together in the 20th century, but are now going their separate ways. Cultural conservatism will look very different in 25 years than it did 25 years ago.
Avik Roy is a former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is also the opinion editor at Forbes, and has advised Florida Sen. Marco Rubio on policy. In 2015, Roy was a senior advisor to former Texas governor Rick Perry; in 2012, he served as a health care policy advisor to Mitt Romney. He is the founder of Roy Healthcare Research, an investment research firm, and previously was an analyst and portfolio manager at Bain Capital and J.P. Morgan. Roy is the principal author of The Apothecary (the Forbes blog on health care policy and entitlement reform), as well as author of Transcending Obamacare: A Patient-Centered Plan for Near-Universal Coverage and Permanent Fiscal Solvency (2014) and How Medicaid Fails the Poor (2013). His research interests include the Affordable Care Act, universal coverage, entitlement reform, international health systems, veterans’ health care, and FDA policy.
