EVERYBODY who liked Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann's piece in the Washington Post on Sunday has something to quibble about, so I'll get mine out of the way now. Messrs Ornstein and Mann write: "While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post." It's not entirely clear what time period the authors are talking about, but their observation doesn't work for any time period I can think of. The Democrats, as far as I can see, have moved from their 40-yard-line to midfield, or their opponents' 45. As recently as the Clinton presidency, Democrats actively pushed for gun control, defence budgets under 3% of GDP, banning oil exploration off America's Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a public option or single-payer solution to universal health insurance, and...well, Clinton-era progressive income-tax rates. Today these positions have all been abandoned. And we're talking about positions held under Bill Clinton, a "third way" leader who himself moved Democratic ideology dramatically to the right, the guy responsible for "ending welfare as we know it". Since then, Democrats have moved much further yet to the right, in the fruitless search for a compromise with a Republican Party that sees compromise itself as fundamentally evil. The obvious example is that the Democrats in 2010 literally passed the universal health-insurance reform that had been proposed by the GOP opposition in the Clinton administration, only to find today's GOP vilifying it as a form of Leninist socialist totalitarianism.

That said, I thought the article was pretty solid. Robert Kaiser (h/t Kevin Drum) highlights the wonky political-science aspect of the argument: the GOP has made the deadly (though politically effective) move of adopting the norms of Westminster-style parliamentary discipline within an America-style presidential system, where such norms bring the machinery of government to a grinding halt. "Today's Republicans in Congress behave like a parliamentary party in a British-style parliament, a winner-take-all system. But a parliamentary party—'ideologically polarized, internally unified, vehemently oppositional'—doesn't work in a 'separation-of-powers system that makes it extremely difficult for majorities to work their will.'"

And yet I can't help but feel that there's more going on here than a shift in the GOP's character or strategic doctrine. Ideological or partisan polarisation has been rising for the past decade-plus in democracies all over the world. Westminster systems may in theory be designed to operate smoothly under conditions of polarisation, but in fact over the past two years the canonical Westminster countries—Britain, Canada and Australia—have all found themselves struggling with the extraordinary spectre of hung parliaments. The French presidential elections on Sunday found the extreme left and extreme right sucking away record portions of the vote, with the two major parties left fighting over a shrinking and uncertain centre. America finds it unusual that for over a decade (since the disputed 2000 election), its governing parties have faced a "crisis of legitimacy", with large segments of the opposition refusing to accept their right to govern; but this is the same period in which governments across the world have faced "color revolutions" whose rhetoric and attitudes have also been geared at engendering crises of legitimacy. Something appears to be driving democratic governance towards polarisation, all across the globe. What can be done to reverse the trend?

The Netherlands last week provided an interesting example, though one that may not find wide application. Dutch politics have been torn apart by unheard-of levels of polarisation since the abrupt rise of the late Pim Fortuyn in 2002. Since then, the falcon most emphatically widening the gyre has been the anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders, who became the key player backing the conservative coalition government over the past year and half. But last week Mr Wilders abruptly pulled out of budget talks and crashed the government. (A fierce eurosceptic, he didn't want to be seen as cutting the budget at the behest of the EU.) The details of the politics are probably too confusing to get into here, but the upshot has been that Mr Wilders has, for the moment, been deeply discredited. Meanwhile, last week, the conservative rump government (sans Mr Wilders) joined forces with the centre-left to put together a deficit-cutting budget programme to submit to the European Commission for approval. Overall, these developments have been billed as a possible reconstitution of the threatened centre of Dutch politics, and a defeat for the forces of polarisation and extremism.

American politics are nothing like Dutch politics, because we don't have ten parties in our legislature. And yet in some ways American politics are very much like Dutch politics: they share themes like anger at ruling political elites, immigrant/native tensions, existential anxiety at the shrinking industrial economic base and widening inequality. And most important, as it turned out after the Dutch centre-right and centre-left cut their deal, it seems that voters—however partisan they may be—really like a compromise. This is something we saw in America as well, last summer after the debt-ceiling impasse, when voters expressed wide relief that the two sides had cut a deal, any deal. For all the ideological convictions they may profess to hold, ultimately, most voters like to see the politicians in Washington cooperating to get things done. This may not always be such a great thing—politicians may receive a bump in the polls from reaching a compromise that is, substantively, awful. But it suggests, at least, that there is a political resource available for politicians who would like to strike deals with each other, and that our march towards partisan gridlock and failure is not entirely irresistible.