Abstract

Troy Duster

The article focuses on the Democratic Party in the United States, following its defeat in the 2004 elections. The Republicans have dug both themselves and the nation into a very deep hole, combining an unwinnable war of occupation in Iraq with domestic policies that have produced the largest gap between rich and poor in all of American history. A day of reckoning will surely come--and rather than rushing to act as willing accomplices, the Democrats should be developing strategies that will provide the nation with alternative and corrective pathways when that day arrives. Interpreting the election results, we get to choose between two nightmares: One, 60 million Americans knowingly voted for President George W. Bush, ratifying the right-wing ideology guiding his Administration. Or two, we have just witnessed a second successive nonviolent coup d'état--a massive voter fraud that produced, among other anomalies, a gap between exit polls and paperless electronic voting tallies. Too few in the electorate recognize that our taken-for-granted institutions of social justice did not arise, as the Republican drumbeat tells them, from "bad values" but as a decent, humane response to widespread woeful living conditions.