And since around 1980, there has been zero controversy on the subject, mostly because just about everyone is happy with things as they are.
Everybody being happy may not be the only reason why isn't there a controversy. I think controversy also depends on a cultural factor where people really push their own opinion hard vs. just accept whatever the social compromise seems to be.
America is very strongly in the former, passionately political since the New Deal, before that not so much aside from the north-south thing. The UK rather the opposite, this is why Thatcher made such a surprise, they weren't used to a politician with an actual vision, ideology and fire in the belly. Usually UK politicians easily support things that don't really match their ideology, like conservative Churchill supporting the creation of the NHS or Blair's Labour privatizing school playgrounds. I currently live in Austria, which is just about extremely boring, politically, everything is a compromise. Actually the head of the state literally said "I think being boring is a national characteristic here... but it is also OK, people can provide their own excitement, it is not the job of politics." I consider Germany and post-Gaulle France also fairly boring politically. France always has surprises though. Italy, now they are never boring, their politics is an incredible freak show :-) I don't know very much about Scandinavia, they seem to be in between, usually very compromise oriented, but also there always seems to be some kind of current issue to be fired up about. In Sweden it seems it is currently largely feminism, in Denmark it is the stupid car tax that tries to protect the environment by cutting down emissions and its actual effect is people having far older cars in the average than in similar countries, which of course increases emissions. I have discussed this with Danish people and asked them if a strongly anti-car politics means the capitol pushing its own interests on small towns that have very different interests, and they seemed to mainly agree, while driving me around Svenstrup.
An old description of the Balkans comes to mind: "It's the region of Europe which produces much more politics than can be domestically consumed" :-)
Also, keep in mind that there are two antonyms of "boring" -- "exciting" and "entertaining". It's fine for politics to be entertaining (see Italy), but "exciting" is iffy. Syrian politics are very exciting at the moment, for example.
One of my favourite Less Wrong articles is Politics is the mindkiller. Part of the reason that political discussion so bad is the poor incentives - if you have little chance to change the outcome, then there is little reason to strive for truth or accuracy - but a large part of the reason is our pre-political attitudes and dispositions. I don't mean to suggest that there is a neat divide; clearly, there is a reflexive relation between the incentives within political discussion and our view of the appropriate purpose and scope of politics. Nevertheless, I think it's a useful distinction to make, and so I applaud the fact that Eliezer doesn't start his essays on the subject by talking about incentives, feedback or rational irrationality - instead he starts with the fact that our approach to politics is instinctively tribal.
This brings me to Joseph Bottum's excellent recent article in The American, The Post-Protestant Ethic and Spirit of America. This charts what he sees as the tribal changes within America that have shaped current attitudes to politics. I think it's best seen in conjunction with Arnold Kling's excellent The Three Languages of Politics; while Kling talks about the political language and rhetoric of modern American political groupings, Bottum's essay is more about the social changes that have led to these kinds of language and rhetoric.
Video of a related lecture can also be found here.