EVERYBODY'S pissed.

The Croats are mad at the Serbs. The Armenians are squabbling with the Azerbaijanis. The Moldavians are scared of the Russians, and Dneisterians are scared of the Moldavians.

It seems to be the way of the post-Cold War world. Stop fighting the Americans, and start fighting each other.

It wasn't hard to predict such divisions in a world with no single power broker and no single overriding conflict. People would begin worrying about long simmering neighborhood arguments again. People would want their own ideas to prevail within their own borders. They would stop looking with hateful, blaming gazes at the Great Satan or the Evil Empire to explain their nation's woes. People would look closer to home.

People like David Duke.

DUKE, you may remember, is the former Ku Klux Klan "Imperial Wizard" who sparked a national firestorm two years ago when he won a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives. He "shocked" Americans and received hate mail from the Bush White House and Ronald Reagan for running as a Republican.

Now Duke is in a hotly contested race for the Louisiana governorship. And once again, he's not doing badly. Indeed, one August poll conducted for a Duke opponent showed him leading his two major rivals, Democrat-turned-Republican Buddy Roemer, the current governor, and the scandal-plagued Edwin Edwards, a Democrat ousted by Roemer four years ago.

And while this poll gave him only one-third of the potential votes, Duke's polls usually miss what The Washington Post calls his "hidden vote" a gap which can apparently increase his numbers by as much as 50 percent.

At first this seems unbelievable. Duke is an avowed racist. He talks about white power. He's a neo-Nazi, for God's sake. So how did he persuade 44 percent of Louisiana's voting population (and, according to The Post, 60 percent of the white electorate) to vote for him last year in a failed bid for the U.S. Senate?

Are Louisianans especially unenlightened? Has all that spicy Cajun food caused some kind of state-wide frontal lobotomy?

Probably not. In fact, the problem is not particular to this state or even to the South in general. Sure, the latent racism that continues to frustrate attempts at U.S. racial harmony as a whole is a little less latent in Louisiana. And in some rural areas, it's a lot less latent.

But the basic problem is deeper--and perhaps more worrisome than Duke alone. The basic problem is the American version of the nationalistic turmoil dominating global politics since the Cold War's end. It's the American version of the internal conflicts plaguing the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Unlike the current struggles in those regions, however, the American version isn't about distinct ethnicities with different languages and cultures fighting for extrication from a contrived union. It's not even about Black versus white. The Duke phenomenon and the politics surrounding it go beyond limited debates about racism in Louisiana. In the U.S., the struggles are about getting elected.

DUKE REPRESENTS only the extreme end of a change in American politics that began with the initial ease of U.S.-Soviet tensions. Just as the independence-hungry nationalists of Eastern Europe were invigorated when they stopped worrying about a nuclear attack from the West, America's own nationalists got a lift, too.

Just as Serbian jealousy of the rich Slovenians perked up once both groups did not have the West as a common enemy, many Americans started questioning the domestic economic policies that held the Cold War coalition together.