Rod finds Santorum’s temperament worrisome:

A truly conservative temperament, though, relies on innate prudence to resist ideology. This is something that eludes Santorum. It’s a fine, fuzzy line between having convictions and being an ideologue. Santorum doesn’t indicate that he knows where that line is, or that there even is a line.

I’m not sure that the line is all that fuzzy, but this is why a self-described “democratic revolutionary” such as Ledeen sees so much to admire in Santorum. Whatever he may believe about religious and cultural traditions at home, Santorum is unabashedly an advocate of an armed doctrine that demands upheaval and revolution overseas. One of Santorum’s favorite tropes is to compare people who disagree with him to French revolutionaries (because of his opponents’ real or imagined secularism), but Santorum is all too similar to the sort of militant promoters of virtue that the Revolution produced. Ledeen said this about himself back in 2006:

I describe myself as a democratic revolutionary, I don’t think of myself as “conservative” at all.

If one were to judge Santorum by his foreign policy commitments, the same could be said about him. As Kennan said in Russia Leaves the War:

We have here, perhaps, another manifestation of the curious law which so often makes Americans, inveterately conservative at home, the partisans of radical change everywhere else.

It is telling that many movement conservatives tend to see Santorum as most politically radioactive when he is at his most conservative and least objectionable when he is at his most ideologically deranged.