Mark Steyn: Romney ran a 'small, shriveled campaign' (Audio)

Filling in on Rush Limbaugh’s Monday radio show, National Review columnist Mark Steyn said that Republicans lost big on Election Day because less engaged and more uniformed voters turned out in force.

“We do very well in off years, in the midterms — 1994, 2002,” Steyn said. “Republicans can have good years then because essentially they’re low-turnout elections — people who are engaged in politics vote. In the presidential years, people voted — a broader pool of voters comes in, and they’re basically people who swim in the broader culture. They’re not people who know the name of their congressmen or governor, and [they] aren’t terribly interested.”

Steyn, author “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,” added that the GOP has had persistent problems getting motivated voters to the polls.

Thanks.

Your other post re a "War and Peace" vs. a "Reader's Digest" level of understanding provides an apt description of one result of decades of deliberate effort and censorship of the ideas essential to liberty from the nation's textbooks and public square.

Such was not always so.

The following excerpt from a 1987 essay entitled "Will the Great American Experiment Succeed?", from the 292-page Bicentennial volume, "Our Ageless Constitution" includes Tocqueville's observations on the level of understanding which existed at that time among ordinary citizens in the wilderness of America. The entire essay, co-authored by Dr. Russell Kirk and the volume's Editor, may be dowloaded here.

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people...said John Adams. And Thomas Jefferson declared: "Whenever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government...The boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them."
Early generations of Americans were taught the principles upon which their nation had developed its Constitution. The Founders believed that the real security for liberty would be a people who could understand those ideas which are necessary to preserve liberty and who could perceive approaching threats to their freedom. For that reason, a primary purpose of the schools was to teach boys and girls to read and write so that they could study the ideas of freedom. A popular textbook for children was entitled "Catechism on the Constitution." Written by Arthur J. Stansbury and published in 1828, it contained questions and answers on the principles of the American political system.
Tocqueville's Democracy In America , written in the 1830's, described America's aggressive process of universal education on the Constitution and the political process:

"It cannot be doubted that in the United States the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of the democratic republic; and such must always be the case, I believe, where the in struction which enlightens the understanding is not separated from the moral education ...." The American citizen, he said, "..will inform you what his rights are and by what means he exercises them .. In the United States, politics are the end and aim of education ... every citizen receives the elementary notions of human knowledge; he is taught, moreover, the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its Constitution .... it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon .... It is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which thought cir culates in the midst of these deserts [wilderness]. I do not think that so much intellectual activity exists in the most enlightened and populous districts of France."

(End of excerpt from
Our Ageless Constitution, W. David Stedman & La Vaughn G. Lewis, Editors (Asheboro, NC, W. David Stedman Associates, 1987) Part VII: ISBN 0-937047-01-5

Those who have bought into the ideas of so-called "progressives" have little understanding of the incompatibility of the ideas essential to liberty and those essential to socialism.

Logical discussions are almost impossible with such uninformed individuals.

Perhaps the final paragraph of Edward Stanley's Robertson's Essay might shed light on the difference between these competing ideas.

The following is excerpted from that Essay, and can be read at the Liberty Fund Library is "A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation," edited by Thomas Mackay (1849 - 1912), Chapter 1, I.46:

"Freedom is the most valuable of all human possessions, next after life itself. It is more valuable, in a manner, than even health. No human agency can secure health; but good laws, justly administered, can and do secure freedom. Freedom, indeed, is almost the only thing that law can secure. Law cannot secure equality, nor can it secure prosperity. In the direction of equality, all that law can do is to secure fair play, which is equality of rights but is not equality of conditions. In the direction of prosperity, all that law can do is to keep the road open. That is the Quintessence of Individualism, and it may fairly challenge comparison with that Quintessence of Socialism we have been discussing. Socialism, disguise it how we may, is the negation of Freedom. That it is so, and that it is also a scheme not capable of producing even material comfort in exchange for the abnegations of Freedom, I think the foregoing considerations amply prove." EDWARD STANLEY ROBERTSON

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