I am among the millions of people in this country who spent the day after the election in a state of cognitive dissonance trying to make sense of what just happened.

I kept asking myself how could this country reward an administration whose record is so openly based on greed, failure, and deceit? I kept mentally running in despair all the likely scenarios of how will the next Bush administration is going to intensify its attacks on poor people in this country, dismantle social security, give more tax cuts to the rich, appoint far-right members to the Supreme Court and the Federal Judiciary, undermine abortion rights, destroy the environment, and erode our civil liberties. No doubt things are going to get bad – really bad really quickly as Alberto Gonzales’ nomination for Attorney General confirms. Which is why a big part of me would have preferred anybody but Bush.

And yet, at another level, another part of me feels relieved that the Democratic Party – together with its alter ego the DLC – didn’t win either. This sense of liberation, however, is not based on some ultraleft posturing around claims that if things get really bad people won’t have anything to lose but their chains. Not at all. The reason for my conditional optimism is because this debacle will allow us to have for the first time in a long time a serious conversation about what would a viable non Democratic Party future would look like.

This election has made clear that the ‘lesser-of-two-evils’ mode of electoral politics in which in every election democrats look more and more like republicans, and we are supposed to pretend that everything is OK won’t do it anymore. It’s clear that this voting approach is a race to the bottom – and we just crashed and burned. The Democrat emperor not only has no clothes, but he has been naked for a long time now.

You see, what this election confirms is that a big part of this defeat is due not so much to media manipulation but to – and I don’t know how else to say it – the Democratic Party’s profound lack of vision and long history of compromises and betrayals on social justice issues. The Democratic electoral strategy of always running on ‘Republican lite’ platforms, have finally run its course and proven its moral bankruptcy.

This preference for ‘Republican lite’ approaches to elections of course is nothing new. Let’s not forget that it was Clinton who presided over the largest incarceration ever of African Americans in this country, signed NAFTA, and repealed AFDC. And definitely let’s not forget either that Clinton is responsible for more Iraqi deaths than Bush thanks to his refusal to end the sanctions. Kerry’s critiques of Bush’s policies on Iraq on the grounds that Bush was not sending enough troops and special forces to Iraq didn’t help either. As we know, things are so bad in the Democratic Party that they wouldn’t even approve a mild antiwar statement for the convention this year. The list goes on and on. So the good news of a Kerry defeat is that we don’t have to deal with the usual request that we delay our social and global justice demands for later on the grounds that we have to rally behind the Democrats no matter what because we cannot afford a Republican victory.

This aftermath will create a space where people will actually entertain ideas ‘outside the box’ of what passes nowadays for progressive and electoral politics. For the first time in a long time we have an amazing opportunity to have a serious debate about how to develop new strategies and institutions outside of the usual Democratic Party machine.

I truly believe that the grassroots swell created during this campaign, combined with its high number of new voter registrations and electoral participation, together with the collapse of the liberal-business-as-usual mode of electoral politics will create the conditions for serious long-term strategizing on how to take back this country from the right wing – and conservative liberals. I look forward to the day when foundations and donors will seriously support long term multi-year left projects and institutions (in just the same way as conservative foundations have supported right wing think tanks and campaigns for many years).

I look forward to participating in conversations about how to develop effective strategies for social change, including but not limited to, what would a viable electoral strategy that puts the needs of the most oppressed members of society at the center of public policy would look like. So let’s sit down and have a real conversation – and the sooner we start the better.

René Francisco Poitevin is assistant professor at New York University and directs the Community Learning Initiative. He can be reached at [email protected].

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