WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Beyond Blue Part 8: Even The Dems Can’t Hack It Anymore.

The conventional wisdom today holds that deep splits between conservatives and liberals have paralyzed the United States government. The country needs major changes, fast, writers like Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum say in their recent book That Used to Be Us, but polarized politics have stopped change dead in its tracks.

Actually, the situation is a little bit more complex — and the news is substantially better than Friedman and Mandelbaum fear. Yes, there is partisan gridlock and bad feeling in American politics. But we are not as stuck or as deadlocked as it may appear. The forces driving change are stronger than many understand while the forces resisting it are weaker and more divided than things sometimes look. The blue social model is breaking up; the outlines of a new social order are beginning to appear.

Politically, it’s clear that of the two parties Democrats tend to be most closely tied up in the blue social model, and Republicans, though not without some blue sensibilities of their own, tend to promote more aggressive reform. But the necessity to move toward something that takes us beyond the blue model is increasingly felt on both sides of the aisle. The public union wing of the Democratic Party and its close allies want to defend the old model and even expand it, but increasing numbers of Democratic officeholders — including the governors of New York, California and Illinois — are moving (sometimes out of conviction, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of both) toward something beyond the old style of liberal governance.

Not a moment too soon. Read the whole thing.