Implicitly at least, a landmark new book, The Twilight of Exceptionalism: The Liberal and Conservative Era, might equally have been titled, "After the Party's Over".

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But to which party would that title refer? Would it be Australia as a whole, which, as Donald Horne noted, had the good fortune to be endowed with vast resources and an inheritance of sensible institutions?

Or more specifically, to the Liberal Party - a mainstay of post-war Australia whose outlook suddenly looks anything but assured?

There is a pervading sense from Paul Kelly, Australia's preeminent big picture, conservative political observer, that something fundamental has cracked within the mechanism of the country. Is it the economy, the stolidity of the Liberal-National parties, the historic ambition of the ALP, or maybe something more atmospheric and ethereal, call it, the magic?

Or is it a mismatch between politics and culture? Perhaps voters themselves have stopped believing?

In fact it might be all of these things at once.

So, why "exceptionalism", a term most commonly applied to the unique latitude America relies on to explain itself?

For Kelly, it refers to the passing of a golden period of uncommon global overperformance marked by a major party willingness to undertake reform and to embrace imaginative policy remedies without paroxysms of national doubt or a full-blown crisis of institutional-national purpose.

In Kelly's broadest conception, Australia had benefited enormously since the 1980s from a centre-anchored right/left political contest which, whatever its noisy differences, delivered usefully long slabs of electoral continuity and policy creativity - Hawke-Keating Labor over 13 years immediately followed by the Howard-Costello coalition lasting 11 years.

Both long runs brought missteps but also delivered........

© Canberra Times