The NYT has a long piece by Christopher Caldwell on Ayaan Hirsi Ali (hat tip: Wretchard) which makes for some good reading although those of you that are familiar with Ayaan will not discover much new. What did strike me though was this part, which essentially sums up why the Dutch are facing a tipping point in the direction their society will take:

Disrupting political classifications is explicitly what Hirsi Ali means to do. In her view, consensus-seeking politicians of all parties work hard to keep off the table the issues most Dutch people care about. Sometimes she refers to these people -- from Dijkstal to the Christian Democrat justice minister Piet Hein Donner to Job Cohen, the Labor mayor of Amsterdam -- as ''the Baby Boomers,'' sometimes as ''Madurodam politicians,'' after the tourist attraction in The Hague that displays the entire Netherlands in miniature. ''We have a fundamental dispute,'' she says. ''The Dijkstal-Cohen-Donner argument is that if you can approach matters in a spirit of pragmatism, you can avoid talking about values.

It's not a total coincidence that the 'value debate' in Holland has primarily been conducted by a gay professor, an unruly film director and a Somali immigrant, two of whom are now dead. There simply is no appetite among the ordinary Dutch to engage themselves in a debate about their future by changing political parties from within and find an appealing and electable leader of whatever political stripe to steer the discussion in the direction of results. Hirsi Ali's claim that the consensus seeking instincts cut across all political boundaries is on the mark and therein lies the problem as any meaningful reform would have to come from within. A campaign from the outside, the right, conducted by new and often radical political parties, is doomed to fail in any democracy but especially in Holland. Wretchard concludes:

Even Hirsi Ali cannot escape the geometric absurdity that European politics has become: a fantastic creature with two extreme Rights and a Left hovering above the dimensional plane, forever blameless, beyond criticism and past hope.

As long as that hovering Left is unable to reform there will indeed be scant hope for the Dutch, and Europe at large.