Recently, I’ve been talking to a lot of Indians involved in conservative politics about what they’re seeing. For example, Vasant Bhatt is a student at the University of Houston who had been an intern for Ted Cruz and was a conservative organizer. He just announced that he had voted for James Talarico, which led to a flood of the most ethnocentric people in politics saying on social media that this proved that Indians were disloyal.
I got connected to Avik Roy (see on X) through my participation in these discussions. I had known him as someone who had been involved in policy disputes during the Obamacare debates. This took me back to a time when conservatives pretended to actually care about policy issues that weren’t directly related to race. I decided to interview Roy for a larger piece I might write about Indian-American Republicans, but the discussion was so good I’ve decided to share the whole thing here, cleaned up for grammar and readability through ChatGPT.
I realized during this discussion that I came to conservative politics in a way that was different from a lot of people who have become disgusted with the direction of the movement. I had always assumed conservatives were racist, and when I was racist myself, I saw it as important to fight so that the id of the movement could take over. That is exactly what ended up happening, but the racists are of course much dumber than I ever was, so their version is way more destructive.
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Meanwhile, people like Roy once believed that conservatives were in it for the ideas about individual liberty and small government. He eventually found out that racial resentment was the underlying motivation of a lot of right-wingers involved in politics, a fact that has become completely undeniable at this point. Our different paths taken to the same endpoint made for an interesting conversation.
Background and Conservative Beginnings
Richard Hanania: Can you tell me a little about your background? What do you do, and how did you get into this work?
Avik Roy: I’m the chairman and co-founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that focuses on how to use individual liberty and free enterprise to help Americans on the bottom half of the economic ladder. How do we show that freedom, rather than socialism or the things people on the left propose, is the engine of social mobility and economic equality?