I’d have much more respect -- okay, some respect -- for religious rightists if they would simply start telling the truth about their strategic goals. Ever since their more visible political ascendancy in the 1990s, they have back-doored the public realm. Implicitly through their words and actions they’ve admitted they can’t win fairly and honestly. They know the American public won’t buy what they’re selling, so they get sneaky.
Don’t take my words for it. Take those of their own, the most famous, I suppose, being Ralph Reed’s goofy 1991 comment that "I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night."
Some might object that this was mere self-aggrandizement and nothing so lugubrious is ever played out on the ground. But consider a more down-to-earth example.
In the early 1980s a Californian by the name of Robert Simonds organized something called Citizens for Excellence in Education. Sounds innocuous enough, for sure, and its publicly advertised purpose was positively noble: to improve public education throughout our land. The organization would do this by helping to elect excellent citizens deeply concerned with better education to local school boards. Thirteen years later Simonds’ outfit would claim victory in having assisted more than 12,000 of its citizens onto these boards controlling more than 2000 schools. Nothing wrong with that. That’s the American way.
But it was a stealth campaign run by a stealth organization.
Rather than improving the quality of education in public schools, Simonds’ goal was to fight "socialistic, atheistic, new age and value-free" schools. He only advertised this in his campaign-advice book, "How to Elect Christians to Public Office." More telling was Simonds “election tactic of choice,” which was to “de-emphasize being a Christian [and] emphasize the candidate's status as a conservative parent concerned about the well-being of children” (emphasis added, Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 11, 1996).
Why the subterfuge? There’s nothing wrong with advocating one’s worldview in the pursuit of what one considers to be better public policy, but there’s something a good deal wrong with folks who feel the need to deceive.
The above tale of stealth is but one of many, and a familiar one to the politically cynical; not, however, to those somewhat less versed in deceptive politics. And the following is for them, assuming a scattered few actually read this sort of stuff.
Most Americans willing to ponder history at all think Hitler rose to power ranting and raving much like any other demagogue and never making a secret of his racial beliefs and eventual racial policies, which makes his rise seem even more horrifying by granting it popular democratic sanction. But there’s a problem with that history, and the problem is, it’s untrue.
It is true, of course, that Hitler demagogically ranted and raved and had spelled out his extreme racialism in Mein Kampf. Yet in his pursuit of public office he later downplayed that racialism in public rants for the simple reason that he had realized it would alienate far too many Germans. He waited. He subdued his true agenda. His strategy was a brilliant tutorial in stealth politics.
Now before you call for the butterfly net and thorazine, let me hasten to say I don’t think some fascist theocracy is imminent, nor am I ringing the alarm bell of how it can happen here and all that. The differences in cultures, history and political circumstances are too vast for such a direct comparison. What I am saying is that there is always a substantive, and usually sinister, reason for stealth politics. So anyone reading this who might be inclined to sign on to such politics should stand back and ask himself -- Why all the cleverness, the subterfuge, the stealth?