Watching the election returns on television two weeks ago, I had the distinct impression, a passing vision really, that the end of the world was upon us.

The entire nation was headed towards Apocalypse and Newt Gingrich, long barbed tail protruding from a Brooks Brothers suit, one hand grasping a pitchfork, the other gesticulating in rhythm with his wild invective, was greeting us at the pit of hell. And then, as quickly as it had come, the vision was gone. Nervously, I assured myself that I had let my mind exaggerate the case.

But watching Newt, Bob, Orrin, Jesse, Alfonse and the rest of Satan's motley crew make their glib, self-satisfied speeches this week, I am now convinced that "diabolical" is too kind a word to describe the New Congressional Order. Perhaps ex-President Bush's "thousand points of light" have come to refer to the remaining true Democrats amidst the all-encompassing night of Republicanism -- tiny candle-flames providing only a little illumination in the face of so much darkness.

Dick Armey in the House has already begun putting specifics on the Contract on America, elaborating the Republican hatred for the working people of America that, come January, will be put in quantitative terms. Although details are still sketchy, a report in the Washington Post last week seemed to indicate that House Republicans planned a significant tax cut for those Americans making more than $100,000 a year, in tandem with a capital gains cut.

In the Senate, the new Judiciary Committee, under the chairmanship of religious conservative Orrin Hatch, planned a "reappraisal" of abortion rights laws and affirmative action programs.

Senator D'Amato, meanwhile, licked his chops at the prospect of pursuing without hindrance Paula Jones' allegations against the President. In a speech to the Heritage Foundation quoted at length in this week's New Yorker, soon-to-be Speaker of the House Gingrich presented his vision of an America where "a belief in the Creator is once again at the center of defining being an American" and where the "secular anti-religious view[s] of the left" based on a "core vision of a hedonistic, existentialist America" have been stamped out.

No spokesman for the "Party of Family Values," meanwhile, happened to mention the disastrous condition of school systems in states across the country or the poverty that plagues our urban neighborhoods and has created lost generations more familiar with the Craps than with college.

Newt Gingrich, for all his talk of a Creator, refused to demonstrate the basic human compassion that a belief in any Creator demands. He talked of prayer in schools, but did not mention the homeless people who we see every day walking the streets of Boston and New York. He could not address the xenophobia and racism that spawned Proposition 187 in California, or the proliferation of guns on our streets that even a few weeks ago allowed a deranged man to fire 15 shots from an automatic weapon into the White House.

The Party in Power, for all its claims to a mandate, could not offer more than facile answers to problems it can barely comprehend, let alone solve. With the exception of a few of its members (notably Jack Kemp), Republicans have a leadership devoid of compassion, only passably human -- a leadership that remains completely disconnected from every American experience except the most suburban, the most comfortable, the most homogenous.

And yet, even after its shocking defeat two weeks ago, the Democratic Party, with President Clinton at its helm, has been remarkable for its similarity to the Republicans. In his morning-after news conference, the President seemed apologetic for having, in some vague way, failed the American people.

Indeed, perhaps Mr. Clinton is right; the midterm fiasco is directly related to the abandonment of the most basic principles of the Democratic party. Since 1988, when then-Vice-President Bush attacked Governor Dukakis as a "liberal," the Democratic leadership has shied away from the ideological stances that once made the party great. This campaign was no different. There were Democratic candidates against gun control, pro-life Democrats, Democrats against immigration, Democrats against gay rights, Democrats for the death penalty, Democrats compromising their morality -- Democrats willing to do whatever they perceived necessary to win. And they lost.

What the Democratic Party needs to realize, before it is too late, is that where Republicans have a "big tent," they have a hanger--if they'll only use it. Democrats have stood fast for civil rights, the disadvantaged and the working man and woman.

They have provided a voice for those who have been attacked mercilessly by ruthless administrations that claimed to want to do away with government intervention while they actively intervened on the side of the business classes.

The Democratic party is the party that began the fight against fascism in World War II while the Republicans were arguing for isolationism and opposing the Marshall Plan and NATO. The Democratic Party created and passed anti-discrimination legislation beginning in 1964, while current Republican Storm Thurmond, now a leader of his party and future Committee chairman, staged the longest Senate filibuster on record to derail the Civil Rights Act.

The Democratic Party has spawned Roosevelt, Kennedy and O'Neill; the Republicans have given us Nixon and McCarthy. The word "liberal" is a progressive one with a long and proud history in this country and, by refusing to carry its standard high, the representatives of the Democratic Party are doing a disservice to all those who have fought on the legislative front, the legal front, and even the battlefront to establish its ideals.

The results of this election should not be read as the defeat of liberal ideals, but as a symptom of the Democratic Party's inability to articulate those ideals. It is past time that Democrats took back the high road, refused to allow Republicans to define them and begun to fight for what they have always fought for--what is good, what is right, what is moral in America.

Then, and only then, will the voters who have stayed away from the ballot box because they have been forgotten send Newt and his pack of devils back home. Until then, look for the new sign in front of the Capitol building: "Abandon hope all yea who enter here."