Rick Santorum concluded his concession speech with some creative historical interpretation:

But their rulers ruled them [the British] from on high, didn’t listen to them as they fought the Revolutionary War. Our leaders were different. George Washington, the signature leader of America, was different. He understood that the greatness of this new country was to have leaders who understood that, in spite of their breeding and education, they didn’t have all the answers, that they could trust the people, that ragtag group of people who stepped forward to volunteer to create freedom in this land.

And they believed General Washington believed in them. In fact, some of his boldest moves came not from him or his generals, but from the ranks. That’s how America’s freedom was won, leaders believing in the people that they led against those who just thought all the answers resided in those in charge.

American leaders during the War of Independence were not all that different from their contemporaries in Britain. That was one of the causes of their grievances against Parliament and the Crown. They were Englishmen entitled to the same rights and liberties, they believed that these rights had been secured in the previous constitutional struggles against the monarchy, and they perceived that Parliament and the Crown were encroaching on those rights in a way that threatened self-government in the colonies. They were not all that different in their political views from their Loyalist opponents, except that the patriot leaders believed that their grievances merited the separation of the colonies from Britain. The Loyalists obviously regarded this as an excessive response to government policy. The Founding generation typically had very little confidence in “the people,” and they did not have appreciably more confidence in “the people” than their counterparts on the other side of the conflict. Early republican leaders did recognize that they didn’t “have all the answers,” but this is because they understood that everyone was fallible and no one person or institution should be entrusted with too much power, and not because they had an abundance of trust in “the people.”