(November 3, 2004]) -- I arrive in San Antonio after an overnight bus trip from Mexico to hear my first post-election news. My heart sinks as I learn that Bush seems to have won a second four years. I had expected that the results would be undecided for weeks, perhaps months. I guess I had wanted to postpone having to face this grim reality -the reality that this United States is now a foreign country to me. As I pass people on the streets, chat with the taxi driver, overhear snippets of conversation in the airport, I feel these are not the people I know, that I grew up with, that I shared a national identity with. This is a strange people, a foreign people. They have just voted for four more years of war! George Bush is a self-confessed war president. That is all he knows how to do. Whether they fully realize it or not, these people have now embraced empire.

It's not just that I am in Texas, with its macho legacy of frontier justice. Now all of the United States is Texas -or soon will be. For how can the humane, generous spirit of a people survive four more years of Bush's arrogant aggressiveness? How can we remain a peaceful people after four more years of war against the world? These years will reshape the character of this people.

I had hoped that this idealistic spirit, awakened from its naïve slumber by the excesses of these last four years, would reject the neo-con's image of America. I had thought that my 80-year-old aunt had reflected the spirit of America when she spoke of her deep dis-ease with the direction the country had taken with the invasion of Iraq. Having lived her whole life in a small town in the upper Midwest, she had believed that the U.S. did good in the world. True, it often made mistakes and things didn't turn out like they should have, but she had a naïve trust that our leaders meant well. George Bush's actions were profoundly disturbing to her because they violated her image of what this nation is about.

I was confident that my aunt spoke for the vast middle America; that they too would find the dissonance between their self-image as Americans and their government's actions unacceptable. In harsh fact, their government -both Republican and Democratic administrations-had long been conducting aggressive interventions in their name. But inattention and lies had concealed this from view. Surely Bush's in-your-face aggressiveness, the transparency of his lies, his stubborn refusal to acknowledge any mistakes even when confronted with disaster -surely this would wake people up. Or so I had hoped.

Obviously, something was lacking. Harsh events had not re-educated the American people. What was missing? Perhaps it was that we had no educator? Who was there to question the legality and morality of unprovoked pre-emptive war? to question this countries' right to make other nations over in its own image? to perhaps even question the foundational premise of Bush's war, namely, that there was a terrorist war against the American people? Certainly candidate Kerry accepted all these assumptions. He accepted the foundation of Bush's policies -he only claimed to be able to do a better job of it. How could he educate the people when he offered no real alternative?

This became abundantly clear when, four days before the election, Osama ben Laden offered a truce. You don't attack us, he said, and we won't attack you. But neither candidate, nor the mass media saw this as a truce offer. Having demonized ben Laden and locked themselves into a war mindset, this was dismissed as a blatant effort to intervene in the U.S. electoral process. Of course it was, as any message to the American people would have been. But a truce offer was hardly an unwarranted message. But Kerry could not have responded positively to such an offer, even if he had wanted to. Bush would have crucified him. It would have taken far more than the remaining four days to re-educate the American people out of their war mindset, a way of viewing our situation that had been drummed into their consciousness by every national leader since 911.

Nevertheless, the educational process of changing that mindset had begun during the early Democratic primary campaign. And it was beginning to bring a hopeful response, as shown in the growing support for Howard Dean. But that was aborted when the Democratic Party elite and the media declared Kerry to be THE delectable alternative to Bush based on his strength in the first primary. Normally it takes several primaries before a front-runner emerges. But so eager was the party elite to short circuit the growing peace forces that they anointed Kerry as the only one electable -thereby making it so as the anti-war vote moved into his camp in subsequent primaries because all others had been ruled out by fiat.

Thus, once again the Democratic Party ended up trying to out Republican the Republicans. And once again the voters said, if we're going to get a Republican, it might as well be a real Republican. The only Democrat who has succeeded at this game was Bill Clinton, and that is because he really was a Republican in Democratic disguise -which is why the Republicans hated him so. Yes, once again the Democratic Party has failed us.

As for the peace movement, it fell silently into step behind Kerry lest it alienate the undecided voters in the middle. It failed to see that these were precisely the people who needed to be re-educated and might have been receptive. Kerry would not educate them. Neither did the ABB anti-war folks.

I had all along said that this election would be a test of the American people. The results are now in. The people failed the test. Or is it we, the anti-war progressive forces who failed? When a student fails, isn't that somehow also a failure of his teacher?

Has the struggle for the character of America been irrevocably lost? Or might it still be possible to turn this nation away from the catastrophe toward which it is now headed? Must we go the way of Rome, or can we still become a shining city on a hill? Are the American people still educatable? Or has the educatable moment passed?

As I go through airport security, it seems somehow different --not objectively perhaps, but in the way I see it. As I put my laptop into the tray, as I empty my pockets, take off my shoes and belt as requested by the Homeland Security drones, a sad anger wells up in me. Before I had seen such procedures as a passing aboration. But now I realize this is now clearly not the case. This is a new America, foreign to me. A nation ruled by fear and thus governed by the masters of fear in Washington. Unlike four years ago, now this is the new national image that the American people have embraced. And that is what they will become -a people who, as Benjamin Franklin said long ago, willing to give up a little liberty to gain security and thus no longer deserving of either liberty or security.

That is no longer my nation.

Cliff DuRand is a former philosophy professor at Morgan State University. For almost 20 years, DuRand was coordinator of the Progressive Action Center in Baltimore, MD. Now he is involved in the Center for Global Justice in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.