Pundits and citizens are debating whether the transition in Washington represents a mandate for the Democratic Party and for its implementation of a new vision for America. The party's lack of a unified platform is being cast by many as a weakness.

Daniel Noam Warner is a graduate student at Duquesne University who lives in Lawrenceville (arendt_1@yahoo.com).

But this misses the real impact of this election. While it is common to think in terms of the parties in power, we must remember that in a democracy the power ultimately resides with the people.

As a modest organizer in this year's election, I had the opportunity to meet and work with the people who made this election turn out as it did -- the people who helped make it one of the most widely participatory midterm elections in recent history. It is us, the new activists, who accomplished this change. And to see where things are going next, let's look at what motivated this activism.

Meeting at my house in Lawrenceville every other Saturday for the two months leading up to the election, as part of a nationwide program organized by MoveOn.org, I held parties where like-minded strangers from around the area brought their cell phones and called voters, encouraging them to "vote for change." I worked side by side with white men, Jews, blacks, immigrants, homosexuals, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Democrats and people who had voted Republican their entire life. Between calls -- and sometimes during phone calls with adamant voters -- we discussed politics, religion, terrorism and freedom. We also shared home-baked goodies and pictures of our families.

We did not share the same answers to the world's problems, and, in fact, many of us admitted that we ourselves did not know the answers. What we shared was a conviction in democracy, and the belief that other Americans -- of all different persuasions -- share this conviction, too. We just had to contact them and get them to vote.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, resulted in a group of leaders taking the reins of this country and telling the rest of us (as Bill O'Reilly so eloquently puts it) to "shut up." They took the opportunity to move us into an illegal war, to provide vast exploitative opportunities to their corporate cronies and to scapegoat homosexuals, the poor and women who exercise their reproductive rights. They advocated for torture, declared that we were either with them or against them and described America as having a "Christian" mission. They even went after the institutions of science, placing incompetent people in important posts at the FDA and attacking research that didn't meet their own idiosyncratic metaphysical conceptions of what constitutes life, or proper "lifestyles."

These actions had a chilling effect: If I disagreed with the government, would they torture me? If even science, the most universally accepted form of knowledge, isn't safe, what is? And they were anti-democratic to the core.

Our country is founded on the philosophy of Voltaire, who famously stated that "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it," and John Stuart Mill, whose "On Liberty" spends most of its pages explaining society's need for open, unbridled discussion. The very essence of the American identity, that "out of many comes one," was challenged by this administration. It was fighting this totalitarian strain that mobilized me into activism this election and that mobilized many of the other activists with whom I worked.

The Democrats don't have a single plan for how to fix the mess the current administration has created, but they do offer a process for solving our problems. This process utilizes rational deliberation and open discussion and goes by the name of democracy. When a politician commits to this, I have faith that other differences can be worked out.

As the Nancy Pelosi- and Howard Dean-led Democratic Party begins to re-implement democracy in the federal government, it is essential that we citizens who put them there continue to act and to support them -- not necessarily to support their ideas, but to support the demand for accountability, discussion and rationality in our political process. Plugging into organizations such as MoveOn.org, or thousands of other politically active groups, is becoming necessary now more than ever.

A republican democracy such as ours requires that citizens hold their politicians accountable. If pro-democracy sentiment doesn't continue to organize politics for the next two, 10 or 20 years, then the radical right-wing forces that got us here will rule in our stead, and the past six years demonstrate how the planet will be the worse for it.

This election proved that when organized we are stronger than the anti-democrats, but the tightness of many races showed that we cannot give up now. We must remain active if progress is to be achieved.