With reports of voting irregularities in several battleground states, we might never know who actually won the 2012 election, but we do know for sure that it is Barack Obama who will occupy the White House for the next four years.  And now we will find out if countless patriots at Tea Party rallies around the country were on to something when they voiced the fear that America will not survive four more years of Barack Obama.

For those mainstream Americans who were alarmed enough at the radicalism of the Obama agenda to get involved in politics for the first time in their lives, the fear that America will not survive more of Obama's agenda was never just political hyperbole.  The fear was grounded in evidence that Obama is an Alinsky-style radical who holds the Constitution in contempt, that he is hostile to those who succeed in the private sector, that he believes that a weaker America will make the world a better place, and that he will use any means necessary to transform America as it suits him.

But with a record that should have made a second term nearly impossible, conservatives should be asking ourselves how the Obama camp got close enough to a majority vote to win the election -- if they indeed won it -- or even to steal it, if that is what really happened.

One conventional answer is that most of the news media were in the tank for Obama, that they kept the lid on scandals like the deadly Benghazi fiasco and the subsequent White House cover-up, and that they got their talking points from the White House.  True though that answer may be, it leaves unanswered a more fundamental question: why would the electorate tolerate such partisan bias from the news media, let alone allow it to influence their votes?

Another conventional answer is that this election occurred at a political tipping point at which almost half of the people voting in the election pay no federal taxes, and that many in this group were likely to vote for Obama regardless of his record.  Granted, there is truth in the idea that a condition of moral hazard exists when people can vote for more government without having to pay for it.  But again, the deeper question should be how the American electorate ever allowed such a situation to develop in the first place.

Surely an educated and informed electorate would recognize and reject liberal bias in the media and would never allow our government to be turned into little more than a vending machine that dispenses favors in return for votes.  Educated and informed voters would see through the hollow, sweet rhetoric of the left to the tyrannical core just beneath the surface.  And there is the painful answer to how so many citizens of a republic just voted to become subjects of a government.

Conservatives have long bemoaned liberal dominance in education from the universities on down, but we haven't done anything about it.  Marxist intellectuals realized decades ago that the eventual victory of socialism would be assured if leftists dominated the educational system and used their influence to push a leftist worldview.  The power of their "long march" through the cultural institutions was that it was not necessary for students to consciously convert to socialist thinking; generation after generation would simply be gradually immersed in the assumptions and dogmas of the left.

Now, after years of patient effort, the teachers' unions have turned America's schools into a wholly owned subsidiary of the political left.  Conservatives have complained when reports surfaced about students being taught to sing hymns of praise to Obama, or when conservative students were harassed in class, or when examples of blatant liberal bias in textbooks came to light, but somehow we allowed ourselves to write off public schools as a lost cause.  Homeschooling and private schools gave some relief, but the idea of getting public schools to transmit a love of liberty and appreciation for free enterprise seemed hopeless.

Besides, conservatives did win occasional victories at the polls, so the republic that our founders left us still seemed capable of self-correction.  But even when conservatives won elections, the people who lost those elections taught our children the next day.  Our children learned that Reagan's tax cuts increased the deficit, but they never heard that those tax cuts stimulated the economy and doubled revenue.  The idea that those deficits came from excessive spending was not even on the table.

So even if it had been Romney taking the oath of office in January, our children would have learned about his policies from the people who voted against those policies.  Our children -- and our future voters -- would have heard the shallow mantras of "tax cuts for the rich" and paying for bombs instead of schools, and many would have absorbed the rhetoric without questioning it.

As long as the left has controlled the schools, time has always been on their side.  We lost the Republic in the classroom long before we lost it in the voting booth.

Dr. Tim Daughtry is co-author of Waking the Sleeping Giant: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals at Their Own Game.