If you think the Democratic Party has already gone off the deep end, just wait. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The looming fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.

Influential figures on the party’s left wing are planning a long-term campaign to move the Democrats to the left, just as right-wing activists took over the Republican Party and moved it to the right over the past 30 years.

If the left’s campaign is successful, it could transform the political landscape of the United States, changing the terms of debate and bringing dramatically different policies on local, national and international issues.

After George McGovern’s landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972, some centrist Democrats argued that Democrats had become too liberal to win national elections.

The accusation was repeated after Michael Dukakis’ lopsided loss to George Bush in 1988. Leading the charge was the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of centrist Democrats who subsequently pushed the party rightward on crime, economics and foreign policy during the presidency of Bill Clinton, himself a council supporter.

Now, leftist Democrats are planning to challenge the centrists’ control. The leftists argue that many Democrats, especially the party establishment in Washington, have become too much like Republicans and too afraid to stand up to right-wingers like George W. Bush.

In the short run, the left-wingers are working hard to elect Kerry, even though they regard him as representing the party’s cautious center. In the primaries, most of the left preferred Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, whose populist, anti-war candidacy threatened to wrest the nomination from Kerry, to the horror of the party establishment.

The left is uniting behind Kerry out of a widely shared conviction that a second Bush term would be an unmitigated, perhaps irreversible, disaster. “Four more years of George Bush would destroy the country,” Dean said in announcing last summer that he would campaign hard for Kerry.