TELLING DAVID FRENCH TO CALM DOWN: No, Ron DeSantis Won’t Destroy Conservatism: David French is wrong to portray the Florida governor as a threat to the movement.

It is with those thoughts in mind that I turn to our old friend David French’s New York Times column the morning after Ron DeSantis’s presidential announcement, which greets the emergence at last of a viable Republican alternative to Donald Trump by claiming that DeSantis could “end conservatism as we have known it.” This is not just unwarranted catastrophism married to impractical utopianism; it is also a misreading of what American conservatism is as well as a betrayal of the principled conservative argument against Trump.

It’s selling out to the enemy’s house organ, actually. More:

David begins by defining “fusionism” as “an alliance between social conservatives and economic libertarians” augmented, during the Cold War, by “the additional commitment to a strong national defense.” That’s really an incomplete vision of modern American conservatism. We can argue over whether fusionism is actually intellectually coherent, but its ambition was to argue that older conservative ideas about tradition, virtue, and social order were not just consistent with liberty, but were better able to flourish in a society that respected not only civil liberty but also economic liberty.

The core of the theory is that the man left alone in his private space beyond the government’s reach — on his own property, in his own community and associations, free to keep the fruits of his own labors — was better able to freely pursue virtue. In this vision, a government’s job is to preserve order, so that this wide private space could prosper free of private as well as governmental intrusion. The essentially Lockean aspect of that theory was neatly summarized by DeSantis himself in his 2011 book Dreams from Our Founding Fathers. . . .

David argues that “fusionists such as me read the Declaration of Independence and reaffirm that governments are instituted for the purpose of securing our ‘unalienable rights.’ Thus, the protection of liberty is an indispensable aspect of American government.” Which, again, is true enough, but it is also too narrow in neglecting the importance of order, property, and virtue to conservative thinking. The first two are crucial preconditions for defending liberty; the third is its ultimate purpose.

Moreover, as Washington and Adams emphasized, and as Reagan warned in his farewell address, liberty and self-government themselves will die if the people cease to be virtuous, and if they are not adequately educated in an informed patriotism that transmits to the next generation the very ideals that we draw from the Declaration and the Founders. Nobody in America today has done more to fight for a pride of place in American education for precisely that sort of schooling than Ron DeSantis.

And no one has done less for conservatism than David French, and his fellow gang of Democrat-adhering, Lincoln-Project-accepting NeverTrump “conservatives.” If they had done their jobs, Trump wouldn’t have been necessary.

Plus:

a major factor in the rise of Trump was a widespread belief by Republican voters that the party didn’t act as if it believed its own ideology, so it was worth choosing a leader who would (it was hoped) focus on results rather than Reaganite rhetoric. It will take time and effort to rebuild the voters’ trust that voting for Republican politicians actually gets you the implementation of Republican ideology. You know who has been wildly successful thus far at enacting the things he says he stands for? Ron DeSantis.

Two, even through the Trump era, the core Republican ideology has remained more continuous from 1854 to the present than its critics allow. That ideology is built around free labor, individual responsibility, public order, American nationalism, and civic virtue. Again, David makes no real effort to argue that DeSantis’s platform and record deviate significantly from that tradition.

I’m reminded of one of Kurt Schlichter’s novels, where a collaborating Bill Kristol is still planning “conservative” cruises in an America that has become, literally, a People’s Republic.