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Everyone knows the Hans Christian Andersen story, "The Em peror's New Clothes." Unfortunately, many seem to have forgotten how it ends-- especially the Democrats who are currently reenacting it.

That the emperor has been defrauded by the scam artists masquerading as tailors is revealed during a ceremonial procession. A child-- the only one present with no reputation or business to protect-- says simply, "The emperor is naked." With the ice broken, others break their silence, calling out, "The boy is right! The emperor is naked!"

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At this point, of course, the emperor might do a number of things. He might have the crooks arrested. He could fire the prime minister and the other lackeys who went along with the charade, allowing him to look foolish because they were too spineless to tell their boss the truth. He could clean house throughout his administration and rethink the vanity that led him into this mess in the first place.

But he does none of these things, as Andersen explains: "The emperor realized that the people were right, but he could not admit to that. He thought it better to continue the procession under the illusion that anyone who couldn't see his clothes was either stupid or incompetent. And he stood stiffly on his carriage, while behind him a page held his imaginary mantle."

And so the Democrats stand, their imaginary mantle flapping in the breeze, claiming with a straight face that the reason the Republicans now control the House, Senate, and White House for the first time in 48 years is that two-and-three-quarter million Green voters were too stupid or incompetent to cast a wise ballot. The venom of the "blame Nader" chorus is becoming embarrassing. I disagree with friends and colleagues about politics all the time, and it's never been a big deal.

Not this year. The viciousness of those who think I violated all-that-is-holy by supporting Nader has been just astonishing, and three months after the election it isn't dying down. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a first-person account of having to call 911 to stop a gay 15-year-old from killing himself-- one of the most frightening experiences I've ever had-- and sent it off to a handful of queer papers which publish my stuff from time to time.

One editor instantly wrote back: "I find it ironic in a sad way that someone who urged people to vote for Nader would now deign to lecture people about gay kids being so desperate as to commit suicide. "One wonders how many of the kids you care so deeply about will commit suicide in the next few years living under an administration that will further a mindset in this country that being gay is evil."

This editor, to my knowledge, never accused Bill Clinton of contributing to teen suicide when, in his waffling 1993 defense of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," he told CBS News that he didn't want to "promote the gay lifestyle," or when in 1996 he ran ads on Christian radio stations touting his early support for the Defense of Marriage Act.

But it seems progressives who voted for Nader will now be held responsible for every bad thing that occurs over the next four years. But it won't fly, because many of those bad things-- and there will be lots of them-- will occur with the acquiescence, and often the active participation, of the Democratic Party. Indeed, it's already started.

Exhibit A: John Ashcroft. We have the Democrats to thank for the fact that this anti-abortion zealot, whose views on the great legal and civil rights questions of our time fall somewhere between Pat Buchanan and Attila the Hun, is our new Attorney General. Yes, Bush appointed him, but the Democrats could have stopped him. They chose not to. Sure, 42 Democratic senators voted against Ashcroft, but those votes were empty symbolism and they knew it. With 50 Republicans and Vice President Cheney as a tie-breaker, the only chance the Democrats ever had of derailing Ashcroft was to mount a filibuster. Senate rules allow just 40 senators to stop virtually anything, but when Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) suggested it a few weeks ago, the silence from his colleagues was deafening. Funny thing: Just months ago, scrambling to convince liberals to support Al Gore and not defect to Nader, many of these same Democrats warned darkly that a George W. Bush administration would be riddled with right-wingers-- anti-abortion, anti-gay, and anti-civil rights-- in key positions. Sen. Russ Feingold, (D-Wisconsin) warned of "the devastation to progressive causes that could occur" because of such appointments. Other prominent Democrats repeated that party line again and again.

But when Bush proved them right-- and it's hard to imagine how he could have appointed anyone worse except maybe David Duke-- the Democrats rolled over. Feingold not only wouldn't filibuster Ashcroft, he actually voted to confirm him.

Why did Senate Democrats play dead when they could have stopped a truly evil appointment? Apparently because the Democratic Leadership Council-types running the show think that political success requires demonstrating "moderation." In that spirit, the right-wingers they portrayed as boogeymen just a few months ago are now to be treated as partners. On the PBS News Hour January 31st, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle explained, "There are a lot of things we could have done [to stop Ashcroft] but chose not to do, in part because we want this partnership to work."

No, Tom. Those of us who care about justice and freedom and civil rights don't want you to "partner" with our sworn enemies. We want you to fight them. We want the walking corpse that is the Democratic Party to actually stand up for the principles it claims to support. Most of us would like to vote for a presidential candidate with an actual chance to win, and we keep hoping we'll see some small stirring of life in the cold eyes and clammy flesh of the DLC-dominated Democrats.

But it isn't there. The people running the Democratic Party apparently believe against all evidence that the way to return to power is to continue scurrying toward the middle of the road-- a spot most often inhabited, as then-Senator Ashcroft correctly observed, by moderates and dead skunks. Many seem to think that Green-bashing will return Nader supporters-- a "traitorous nest of vipers" according to one particularly demented rant recently published on Gay Today-- to the fold.

Counter-insurgency

Anyone who believes that might want to take a close look at the recent municipal election in San Francisco, a city where 80 percent of registered voters are Democrats. In November, a group of neighborhood-based insurgent candidates forced virtually the entire Democratic establishment-dominated majority on the Board of Supervisors into runoffs.

One of those insurgents, Matt Gonzalez, did something even his strongest supporters thought was politically nuts: Shortly after the November election he left the Democratic Party and publicly reregistered as a Green, saying he could no longer stand to be in a party that supports the death penalty, opposes gay marriage, and squelches dissent and free debate. What San Franciscans unlovingly call The Machine went right to work. Aiming to destroy Gonzalez, a mayoral aide took a leave of absence from his six-figure City Hall job to work for his opponent, Juanita Owens. The Machine's massive soft-money operation cranked out mailers touting Owens as "the ONLY Democrat in the race," and trying to blame Gonzalez for Gore's defeat. "DOESN'T THIS GUY GET IT?" one mailer screamed.

People got it alright, and the effort failed utterly. In a massively Democratic district Green candidate Gonzalez won by two to one. Thousands of Democrats showed they would rather vote for a Green who is honest, progressive and willing to stand up for what he believes than a money-and-power Democrat.

The Democratic Party, hemorrhaging votes as it continues to lose its soul, faces as stark a choice at it has ever had: It can realize what's happening and begin to make changes or it can continue on just like the emperor, standing stiffly in front of the tittering crowd and vainly pretending it's all their fault that they can't see his beautiful new suit-- and all the while cursing the child who dared to tell him the truth.