TAKE A DEEP breath. Try to relax. It's bad – very bad, as bad as it's been in a long, long time – but this is no time to sit around and wallow in despair. There's too much work to do.

George W. Bush, barring some unexpected health issue or truly unlikely turn of political events, will be president for another four years. We can't claim this election was stolen – Bush won by more than three million votes, and despite some legitimate concerns about voting procedures, it appears that he won decisive enough margins in the swing states that he has an actual legal mandate to serve.

He also has a majority in both houses of Congress and a working majority on the Supreme Court. It will be hard to stop, or even slow down, his legislative agenda in Washington, D.C.

And it's an alarming agenda: Bush quickly announced, almost immediately after the election, that he wants to privatize social security, give more tax cuts to the rich, and continue unabated the war in Iraq. (At press time, the Marines were planning to storm Fallujah – a move that's bound to result in heavy casualties as troops fight house-to-house against a guerrilla insurgency.) Anyone who thinks he'll be able to continue this ill-advised war without ultimately resorting to a draft isn't looking very hard at the numbers: the armed forces are so shorthanded that poorly trained and inexperienced National Guard and reserve soldiers are not only in combat but are also being held in service beyond their enlistment agreements.

It's going to be a terrible time to be poor. Federal subsidies for social programs, from housing and homeless programs to food to schools to health care, are going to face even more drastic cuts as the wealth in society continues to trickle up. It won't be a great time for cities in general – San Francisco can expect its budget problems to continue as aid for everything from homeless programs to transportation dries up even further. It's a good bet the economy will continue to stagnate too, as the federal deficit grows and the war damages consumer and business confidence.

But complaining isn't going to make things any better. If there was ever a time to listen to the old adage "Don't mourn, organize," it's now.

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Before anyone can start taking the next steps toward fighting the Bush agenda, it's important to stop for a moment and look at what happened Tuesday. The Democrats did exactly what they thought they had to do: they nominated a candidate who had an honorable military record, whose political record (on the war and welfare reform, for example) was much closer to that of Bill Clinton than to that of Ted Kennedy. They picked a presidential contender who may not have been the favorite of the party's liberal wing, but who was, in that painful word, "electable."

They raised gobs of money. They mobilized forces on the ground. The party and independent groups registered huge numbers of new voters, particularly young people and African Americans, in the swing states. The Democratic candidate won all three televised debates.

And yet, when the votes were counted, John Kerry was defeated. There are all sorts of explanations (religious conservatives also ran extensive get-out-the-vote operations, Kerry was, ahem, somewhat lacking in charisma, Bush successfully defined himself as a "wartime president," and Kerry failed to define himself as an economic reformer, etc.), but one of the most compelling comes from Thomas Frank, the author of What's the Matter with Kansas?

"The culture wars," Frank wrote in a Nov. 5 New York Times op-ed piece, "are a way of framing the ever-powerful subject of social class. They are a way for Republicans to speak on behalf of the forgotten man without causing any problems for their big-business constituency.

"Against the militant, aggrieved, full-throated philosophy, the Democrats chose to go with ... what? Their usual soft centrism."

The Republicans have managed to define the word liberal – and by implication, any progressive Democratic agenda – as elitist. That's left the Democrats paralyzed: instead of fighting back, they try to act more like the Republicans, to defuse issues like same-sex marriage and gun control by blurring any distinction between the two parties. In the meantime, they have failed to push what Frank calls an "economic populist" agenda to compete with the "cultural populism" of the right wing.

There will always be some hard-core social conservatives, particularly the evangelical theocrat Christians, who will never vote for a Democrat because they oppose abortion, want Bibles in all the schools, and think homosexuality is a sin. That's a large enough constituency to make trouble for the Democrats – but it's still by no means a majority of Americans.

The constituency Kerry (and Gore before him) lost was the Southern and Midwestern working people whose economic interests lie completely with the Democrats – but whom Kerry didn't reach because he didn't really try. There's only one way to combat the "culture warfare," and that's to stop being afraid of what the GOP likes to denigrate as "class warfare." Every Democrat running this year except Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Rev. Al Sharpton shied away from talking clearly and directly about progressive tax reform, income redistribution, the wealth gap in our society, and the need to raise taxes sharply on the rich to fund lower taxes and more social programs for the middle-class and the poor.

Now, with what seems like a quadrennial "battle for the soul of the Democratic Party" underway again, the Clintonites will be pushing once again to move to the center, to avoid any hint of East Coast (or West Coast) liberalism, to denounce same-sex marriage, to go along with Bush on appointing far-right judges to the federal bench, and to stay hawkish on the war. In essence, to sound even more like Republicans than the Democrats already do. (Already, Sen. Hillary Clinton, a likely contender in the 2008 Democratic primaries, is moving desperately to the center on foreign policy issues.)

That would be a bad mistake. Not only does it undermine what the Democratic Party ought to be about, but as Frank points out, it won't work.

The first big decision will come with the selection of a new party chair to replace Terry McAuliffe. There's talk on the political Web boards of a push to put Howard Dean in that slot, which would at least be a dramatic move – but even Dean, for all his strong stands on the war, wasn't and isn't an economic populist. What the party needs is a fighter, someone to lead the resistance, to set a winning agenda – and to develop new leaders in a party that seems awfully weak on the bench.

It's going to be a rough four years – but if we don't get to work, now, the right-wing domination of American politics will last well beyond Bush.