Statism and libertinism are two of the greatest threats faced by the American republic

 Hear, hear.

Fusionism or the Founding?

... the so-called “Dissident Right” can offer America nothing like renewal.

... the axioms of ideological liberalism cannot answer the present crisis.

... Tradition, not fusion, is the surest guide. 

Ron DeSantis is up against an American public grown and growing overwhelmingly libertine on sex, which is one reason why Trump remains as popular as he is

 

Progressives and liberals are in a panic over Ron DeSantis because he's tapping into a huge shift in public support for law and order and against LGBT

 Gallup shows the huge shifts in 2023 from 2022.

Support for the death penalty is up 5-points nationally. Support for LGBT is down 7-points. Those are massive changes.

And on most of the issues tracked, which are barometers of libertinism in the United States, support is also down, from birth control to fornication, to teenage sex and divorce.

Win or lose, DeSantis represents the backlash against the left which is sweeping the country.

 

Erick Erickson asserts a difference between libertarianism and libertinism

Today filling in as guest host of the Rush Limbaugh Show in response to a caller recommending the Republican Party move in a more specifically libertarian direction.

The comment was more diplomacy than wisdom.

In the Molly Ball feature on Erickson for The Atlantic here, Erickson more than once eschews libertarianism, let alone libertinism:

“Nationally, people think of me as a Tea Party person, and I am,” Erickson told me. “But in Georgia, the Tea Party can’t stand me.” The local movement, he explained, is dominated by libertarian followers of former Congressman Ron Paul, and Erickson has opposed many of its chosen candidates. Erickson’s conservatism is of a more traditional bent, deeply informed by his evangelical faith. He believes Republicans must not yield in pursuit of small government, strong national defense, and the primacy of the traditional family.

Erickson sounded almost gleeful as he told me about the Tea Party hating him. He seems to delight in confounding expectations, and in almost every way, he refuses to be pigeonholed: he is a southerner who defines himself by his small-town sensibility, but he spent most of his childhood in Dubai. He speaks for the conservative grass roots, but he pals around with cable-news regulars and Beltway elites. He’s a strict no-compromises ideologue, but during his one foray into elected office, he was a model of bipartisan cooperation. ...

When I pressed him on whether his zeal for regulation while on the city council was at odds with his less-government philosophy, he said he believed human trafficking was a problem that government should have a role in solving. “I’m not a libertarian,” he said. Even small-government absolutists, after all, can agree that sexual slavery ought to be prevented.

Blaming negative GDP on the harsh winter is already forecast to get worse

The consensus estimate of the third and final report of 1Q2014 GDP, coming out on Wednesday next week, is already 60% worse than the actual second report at -1.6%. What, is the late winter suddenly become worse in the last month?

The first estimate, you will recall, came in at +0.1%, and was quickly downgraded in various places to something ranging between -0.2% and -0.4%. When the second estimate came in at a much worse -1.0%, just about everyone blamed the harsh winter for the pathetic print, including the White House, which incredibly credited GDP from spending on utilities at the same time it debited GDP because people weren't traveling (which isn't true--just examine the government's miles-traveled reports over the winter), weren't vacationing and weren't spending money on hotels and restaurants, and other such drivel.

Having it both ways, it seems, only applies south of the Canadian border, where real GDP was a negative almost $40 billion. North of it real GDP was actually positive, despite the winter, at about $4.7 billion US. A much smaller economy Canada's is, to be sure, but for that reason you'd think it more vulnerable to the harshest winter in decades whereas our much larger, more varied economy ought to be more resilient.

But up against an Obama, you would be wrong. He is secretly happy that things are going as poorly as they are, because it means that the middle class is steadily shrinking and soon will no longer be able to stand in his way, and the Democrat Party's way, of remaking America into a few haves and a lot of have-nots.

In this they are assisted by the libertarians who have successfully infiltrated the Republican Party as conservatives, who see this as their natural mission, too. Politically speaking, they are out to defeat Republicanism just as much as the Democrats are. The successful individual lone ranger is the sine qua non of their vision, after all, whose fabulous wealth is the only object of their affection. And the only thing standing in his way are people who believe in something bigger than themselves.

People who believe in something larger than themselves in America today occupy the extremes of the left and the right, and seem to be getting fewer in number as we speak, a fact noted in a recent article in The New Republic. Between them are a mass of social and economic libertines who are already the slaves of the elites, for whom neither the economic nor the moral restraint of the Protestant founders which built our country are a value. Unless we recover something of the latter the America of the past will cease to exist, if it hasn't already.

And persistently poor GDP proves it.