Contrast Ruy Texeira’s vision of the future of American politics as outlined in a new essay in Democracy Journal:

The development and implementation of a new progressive growth model will be central to Democrats’ identity by 2024 and much of the debate between the parties will be about whether that or a conservative alternative with a more limited, though still significant, role for government is more effective. For example, a Democratic presidential candidate in 2024 might be arguing for a dramatic expansion of the American educational system—say, making post-secondary education universal—while a Republican candidate might also advocate expansion, but a more limited one combining modest student subsidies with tax breaks for profit-making schools. But the days when Republicans could stand pat on cutting taxes and Democrats on defending Social Security and Medicare will be over.

with Walter Russell Mead’s ongoing discussion of the collapse of the blue social model and the post-blue model that is emerging in its place:

In this kind of system, where there is a lot of diversity in practice and philosophy, oversight would shift from process to product. Students would need to pass exams at key points along the way to move up in the system, including a comprehensive test to get a high school diploma. But teachers and coops would be free to offer many different approaches by which students could move toward these goals, and parents would be free to find the personalities and educational approaches they thought would be most likely to benefit their kids. And parents can always move their kids to another program if they think the current one isn’t working.
The point is that our society today, with many better educated people than in past generations, does not need the same kind of archaic, expensive, top heavy layers of management and administrators that past generations felt compelled to introduce. We can cut costs and improve performance at the same time by reconstituting more of our institutions as internally managed organizations. It is likely that many functions of city and state government could be cooperatized in this way, with employees liberated to become the directors of their own enterprises and the architects of their own working lives.

A dramatic expansion of the existing American educational system, in which entrenched incumbents use licensing restrictions, accreditation cartels, and concentrated political power to stymie business-model innovation, is one thing. The creation of a new American educational system that is more open and entrepreneurial is quite another. This strikes me as a more plausible left-right conflict in the years to come, as the incumbents have considerable political power and creating space for entrepreneurial alternatives is, as John Chubb and Terry Moe argue in Liberating Learning, the most effective means of countering it.