In order to shake a largely disconnected public out of the ignorant acquiescence that currently characterizes the relationship of the people to their government, the Democratic Party must get beyond tepid criticisms of the administration larded with assurances of "100 percent support for the president on the war." Meaningful opposition will require vocal, articulate and contrary argument. To mount it, the Democratic Party must put forward an agenda that is fresh in its honesty and stark in its difference from the one offered by the Republican Party. It must offer the American people a real alternative to the morass of war, profiteering and isolation that the Bush administration has committed to. And it must reconnect with the progressive values that set it apart from the Party of Trent Lott.

Bill Clinton returned the Democrats to power by combining progressive legislation, conservative fiscal policy and an unbridled optimism that communicated a buoyant love for American democracy. A reassertion of the power of that democracy, both outside America and at home will put the Party back in the White House, provided it can be articulated in a way that moves the American people.

Just as their opponents unabashedly promote the values of neo-conservatism, Democrats should be bold in embracing global principles of human rights and dignity. America has squandered the opportunity to emerge out of 9/11 as the genuine leader of a new era of democracy by isolating ourselves behind a wall of belligerence and naked greed. The Democrats must at least make the offer to pull us back from the brink by combating hatred, rage and resentment with economic and political cooperation, global justice and the recalibration of human potential around the world.

The administration is foisting upon a frightened public its Orwellian vision of a world constituted by little more than a string of productive wells, protected by proxy troops paid with corporate dollars and insured by puppet kings. We confer legitimacy on the dictator of Pakistan in order to remove the dictators of Afghanistan, and we coddle the dictators of Riyadh in order to facilitate our president's Shakespearean duel with Saddam Hussein. We deploy our troops between the corrupt government of Colombia and its ruthless rebel enemy, to protect the underground wells of Occidental crude. We send our best and bravest to fight and die to make the world safe for American oil wells, rather than to make it a better place.

The American people signed on for the Fireman's War, not a War Without End And For Oil. The Democratic opposition must say in no uncertain terms that our War on Terror has lost its way, and it must promise to turn our ship of state around.

So too, must the Party shed its fear of criticizing the administration's war on the bedrock principles of American democracy at home.

The neo-conservatives calling the shots in Washington have used the events of 9/11 to browbeat Americans into believing that in order to have our security, we must hand over the keys to the Constitution to an administration that views the presidency as a Caesarian fiefdom and the congress as an irrelevant nuisance. They have convinced an alarming plurality of uninformed and frightened Americans that they can give away the rights of others in the hope that their own rights will not vanish into the ether that is left when democracy is stripped away.

They have bullied the press into giving in to its own laziness and narcissism, so that what passes for news is little more than Pentagon press releases and government mandated pabulum designed to stifle debate and promote the nihilistic vision of the men in charge of the Bush war machine.

They have used the events of 9/11 to complete the synthesis of corporate greed and Cold War militarism that began in the 1980s.

They have used the "war on terror" to foist upon the American public a platform of religious intolerance, government invasiveness and the evisceration of government for the public good by wrapping it in the flag, and daring their opponents to utter a word.

They have promoted the unadulterated success of a military campaign that has produced no substantive results - no arrests of senior militants, no significant reduction in the capabilities or passions of the enemy, no incentive for young Muslims to turn away from terror. The dirty little secret of the "war" is that it has produced little beyond the destruction of a third-rate religious dictatorship and its replacement by a former consultant to an American oil company. Yet the Republican hawks have signaled that the president will wage war wherever and however he chooses, and the Congress and the American people will hear about it if and when Mr. Bush sees fit to tell them what he deigns they shall know.

The fighting wing of the Republican Party has pulled off this high stakes game of three card Monty by being more disciplined and more ruthless than the opposition. Over the past sixteen years, they have succeeded in poisoning the well of public debate to the point that progressive ideas are considered nothing less than the mother's milk of socialism. Through the skillful, long term and relentless use of money, corporate collusion, think tanks and well-placed pundits, the neoconservative movement has tightened its grip on public policy, the media and the administration itself. In the last eight years, they have been unabashed in rigging the machinery of scandal to make reprobate the values that underlay Roosevelt's four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom from want, freedom of worship and freedom from fear. They have replaced those values with a McCarthyite assault on free speech, an unprecedented attack on government safety nets for workers, the old and the poor, a frightening drive toward plutocracy, and the naked politicization of fear.

Democrats must go to war to save Roosevelt's vision.

"As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone. Those who man our defenses and those behind them who build our defenses must have the stamina and the courage which come from unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending. The mighty action that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all the things worth fighting for," Roosevelt said in his landmark speech of January 6, 1941.

"The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are : Equality of opportunity for youth and for others. Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it. The ending of special privilege for the few. The preservation of civil liberties for all. The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living. These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding straight of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations..."

"In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression --everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-- everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants --everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor --anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb."

The Democratic Party needs its Franklin D. Roosevelt, and it needs him (or her) badly.

Joy-Ann Lomena Reid is the founder and senior editor of TRUYU.COM, an online news magazine for women of color. E-mail: editors@truyu.com

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