So yeah, the Democrats had a pretty good election on Tuesday: Electoral vote landslide for Obama, wins for progressives like Liz Warren, Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown and Alan Grayson, and losses for misogynistic Tea Party buffoons like Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Allen West and Joe Walsh. Better yet, as the minority and youth votes grow, it looks like these kinds of results could be the new normal.

But…

Something’s different about 2010. Try as I might, I’m having a hard time getting excited about the fall campaign. It’s not that the Democrats are now on the defensive, or that the Republicans have succumbed to the Tea Party lunacy, or even that all of the Congressional gains of 2006 and 2008 might be undone. What’s gotten me so indifferent is the growing realization that these miderms don’t really matter. And in retrospect, neither did 2006 nor 2008.

It has become fashionable on the Left to feign a world-weary cynicism. The “Audacity of Hope” is often considered a utopian conceit, and a New Fatalism has descended upon the Left. We must not be afraid of the inspiration that we got from the Audacity of Hope, even if our prophet seems to have feet of clay.

A while back Jake McIntyre wrote an interesting post (for which he was widely pilloried) noting that the same people who supported this bill were those who supported the Iraq war. Not a coincidence. The health care bill is a neoliberal victory, just as the Iraq war represented a neoliberal triumph. As willyloman said in a Seminal diary yesterday, neoliberalism is now being rebranded as populism, with the President acting as chief salesman. But in emails like this, and Nancy Pelosi’s trumpeting of the bill’s Heritage Foundation roots, it’s clear that the Democrats know what they’ve done. They have no intention of reversing themselves now. And they are consciously punching the progressive hippies whose messaging and ideals brought them their majorities in the first place.

The times call for a leader of Churchillian or Rooseveltian magnitude; what we have instead is a cautious risk-averse manager. Bold progressives must fill the leadership vacuum in order to restore and support a vibrant US middle class.