Josh Marshall is brilliant, but I think he's wrong to worry this way:

For the Democrats, what I fear most (and what I've privately worried about for months) is this: Energy cools after an election. That's inevitable. But organization and institutions can survive. And it is within institutions and organizational infrastructure that energy and power exist and persist.

Certainly it would have been more pleasant (and perhaps better) to nurture all the organization and infrastructure that has been built up over the last two years under a President Kerry. But my concern over the last few months has been that if Bush won, all of these groups and organizations and incipient infrastructure would simply be allowed to wither, as though it had been tried and found not to have worked.

That, as a factual judgment, I think is just plain wrong. And if that were allowed to happen it would truly be tragic.

I don't think it will happen. Why should it? We need anti-Bush organizations more than ever -- in fact, I think organizational energy might have dissipated a lot more if Kerry had won (on the assumption that victory was ours). I don't think Democratic electoral success is actually a bad thing like, say, Alexander Cockburn or Ralph Nader -- look at the horrible damage Republicans do in office -- but I think losing at the polls leaves us with no arena but non-electoral politics, so everything we developed for this election needs to become the foundation for the future.