I mentioned earlier that Rush has interviewed me for the next edition of The Limbaugh Letter. On today's show, he talked about some of what we discussed:
RUSH: I interviewed Mark Steyn, occasional guest host of this program. He's got a new book out. I interviewed him last week for the next issue of The Limbaugh Letter. And we got to talking. He had made a statement that I needed him to explain. I needed some clarification. He said, "You cannot have a conservative government with a liberal culture." I wanted to know if he meant that literally or if he meant it in some other context, because clearly if the Republicans win the presidency in 2016, we're going to have, maybe not a conservative, but we're going to have somebody who is not liberal as president in a liberal culture. And by definition that will be a, let's say, Republican government.
Now, I know the bureaucracy is populated with career leftists. But we're speaking theoretically here. The point he was trying to make was it doesn't matter. If we don't change the culture, we're never really going to change anything. We can have all the conservative presidents we want and if that doesn't mean or translate to or result from a change in the culture, the culture remains dominantly liberal.
I talk about that in the very first piece in The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, and it's a recurring theme of the book. Most of the big profound changes in western society - gay marriage, the rise of Islam, etc - bypassed the political process entirely, to the point where politicians are nervous of even raising the subject. If you let liberalism become the default societal setting on the 364 days of the year there's no election being held, what happens on election day is going to be pretty unimportant. So, if you're not playing on the big cultural battlefields, you're going to lose.
~Thanks to Rush for giving a head's up to the new book. The [Un]documented Mark Steyn is released in North America on Monday October 20th. You can pre-order it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and other retailers in the US. In Canada, it's available at Indigo-Chapters, Amazon, McNally-Robinson and elsewhere.