Wily winning: A manual of mutating political philosophy – October 13, 2008
By Joseph Randolph
web posted October 13, 2008
Dear M.
We don't have any principles to compromise, except our commitment to winning elections, and that is never compromised. It is never subjected to doubt or scrutiny by us, even from a distance, no matter what the state of the world or of ourselves. In short, winning is first on our list; everything else is second and beyond. As one from the gridiron used to say, "winning is not everything, it is the only thing." Moreover, everything else is background to the stage set for defeating our opponents. This gives our effort at election singular focus and keeps us steadily on track because we know our unquestioned goal is never to suffer a detour. Therefore, you can quit your recurring worries, again, over eliciting voters whose only worth to us is that they vote for us. The fact that we use them to further our own ends—election to office—presents no rumbling of conscience for us, because we don't have one to worry with: neither should you. The votes of our voters are our reason for concern for them.
Your question about religious voters is a pertinent one in a country still dripping with dank piety. Such voters are sometimes the key to elections won and lost; therefore, we must have them within our sights, particularly in these last days of campaigning, and more importantly, you must know how to lure them into the voting booth with us, in good conscience—theirs. They do present onerous obstacles at times, but also great opportunity if handled with sufficient skill. So that you end up a recipient of the latter, listen carefully.
The dark religious are obsessed with their archaic notions of right and wrong saint and sinner, that most of the enlightened abandoned light years ago. We believe in no such obsolescence or pedantry, but we do have a hook with the religious voter despite our disbelieving depravity. The similarity between us and them that we could suggest to them, some will notice even without our pointing. To even the lesser witted intellects among them, we curiously resemble them in their clamoring cry for forgiveness simply because we oftentimes "let bygones be bygones." We, in other words, are willing to let trespasses go unnoticed, and we do in fact encourage this trait in others—if to our benefit and gain, i.e., votes—and tout it from the rooftops if it offers advantage to one among our numbers who may have fallen.Ultimately, however, we feign this "forgiveness" nonsense over wrongdoing because we take no offense at "sin." Nevertheless, the religious among our voters may surmise that we irreligious are religious without knowing it: thus they view us as possibly tolerable. If they reason a bit more, they may surmise that this presumed similarity between us and them is because their religion, though rejected by modern secular people, nevertheless shows a residual effect even among the mockers and debauchers—ourselves. Thus, for example, and aside from the whole "forgiveness" quaintness, we seculars still clamor and demand and believe that the oppressed will eventually triumph over the oppressor, as our Master inexorably believed and taught us to believe. Some of our own scholars opine on this completely dubious relationship, though mistakenly as I will soon point out, as if we secularists are unable to resist the Christian and religious message steeped in our bones: though shed it we have from our skins. This of course is all nonsense, but tolerable nonsense, for if our religious voters apprise us in such a manner that causes them to vote for us—then we applaud their mistaken thinking.
It is a mistake for us to see ourselves connected to any religion in this way, however; furthermore, we have no patience for those among us hankering backwards to darkness by reconverting back to from whence they came by this pseudo resemblance of light to darkness. We are indebted to no one nor to any belief for our actions, except our own. The Master himself would disown any such religious pollution, or better yet, outright thievery, of his true theory. As he so eloquently wrote, what happens happens because it happens. There is no "ought" attempting to right an upside-down world. The Master saw clearly the direction and cycles of history and simply pointed out that what will be will be. Thus, we have history on our side; god and fairies will have to be relegated to the fantasies clinging and claiming fatuous responsibility for the socialist march of history. We do accept converts, however, but from where they come and how they come, we care not a wit. Tell your potential voter that if he is troubled on his journey to us, that what he must do—in language he can understand—is to be born again, because his prior rebirth was the wrong one.
Excuse the diversion, except if you win this election you will have to school yourself in the theory after you have benefitted from the practice. The Master will perhaps forgive our interest in the theory after he cautioned that our point is not to understand the world but convulse it.
So, the religious among your voters may take your leniency toward wrongdoing, their "sin," as an earmark of "grace," albeit this concept too is as much of a stranger to us as the antiquated "sin" notion. Hopefully what the religious voter drawn to you will not notice is that you are as dismissive of grace as you are of sin; the fact that you go past human foibles with such indifference is because you have indifference to these bogus religious unrealities of "sin" and "grace." To your advantage, nevertheless, is the fact that your curious religious voter may think you exceed him in your readiness to extend grace to the wrongdoer. He has thus completely misread your action, but all to your benefit—his vote!! Your retraction of judgment in the face of wrongdoing shames his sinful propensity to judge; you, therefore, have trumped him in the practice of his religion, even as you are on a clear day, distinctly and thus noticeably anti-religious. His head will now spin, but his pencil is also being prepared to put a check by your name on the ballot. He will rack it up to his mysterious god; we of course care not from whence his vote comes, as long as it comes. We as consequence will be elected because this potential voter in his stupidity mistakes us as one of his own. Even this revelation he may not fret over, but rather, and better, count himself more broadminded than his brethren who cannot imagine a wolf having a place in the sheepfold, when he, now enlightened, can. In fact, if he keeps it up, he may even consider that what he thought of as sheep are indeed goats, and what he thought of as goats are indeed sheep. Your goal by the next election cycle is to see him replace his outdated sacrificial religion with ours. Probably, however, you will have nothing to do for him, because he will do it all for himself. All sliding board, again. Meanwhile, we will, with help such as this, turn the world upside down. 
Joseph Randolph is a writer and academic who lives in Wisconsin.