Perhaps Rick Santorum is demonstrating persistence beyond the call of plausibility, but he says compelling political logic and high duty converge. Although he has not made a decision about 2016, he candidly says he is doing “everything consistent with running” — traveling to speak to sympathetic groups and donors. His hand is on his sword’s hilt.

When Santorum entered the fray for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, he drew his sword and threw away the scabbard. The stakes could not, he thought, be higher, so he was in for the long haul. Which ended with the April 3 Wisconsin primary. Now the former senator from Pennsylvania, who wound up being the last man standing between Mitt Romney and the nomination, probably needs a new scabbard to toss aside.

With disarmingly cheerful ferocity, he relishes combat in what he calls “a two-front civil war” within the GOP. The party is, he says, in danger of becoming “a one-legged stool.” The “Eastern establishment types” want to saw off the cultural conservatism leg, concentrating on economic issues. The rising libertarian faction, exemplified by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, wants to saw off the strong foreign policy leg. Furthermore, Santorum says, “Americans are not ready for a dramatic withdrawal of government from their lives” of the sort many Tea Party types advocate.

Looking to 2016, Santorum rightly says Republicans “have got to work on the hopeful and optimistic side” of politics. But he wants to compel a troubling conversation the nation would rather not have.

“At any given moment,” wrote George Orwell in 1948, “there is a sort of all-prevailing orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact.” Today, that fact is family disintegration: 41 percent of American children are born to unmarried women, including nearly half of first births, 53 percent of Hispanic children, and 72 percent of African-American children. In 2015, these facts will be discussed in connection with the 50th anniversary of the Moynihan Report.