Shock treatment or catastrophe?

During one of the GOP's exercises in debt ceiling terrorism, I think in 2013, Jonathan Chait wrote (in a piece I can't locate) that Republican extremism would lead to catastrophe eventually (here is a variant).

That forecast played in my mind whenever I looked ahead at elections -- not just to 2016, but beyond. My thought was, it's a two-party system, and Republicans have to win the presidency sooner or later. Would we win a breathing space in which Democratic reforms could be cemented and the GOP would finally begin to moderate? Which would happen first, Republican victory or moderation?

Now we have our answer. In 2012, Obama told donors that if he won reelection, 'the fever would break." He won, and it went to 106 degrees, and spread to half the electorate.

Sometimes catastrophe is the route to progress -- as in the Great Depression, which ushered in FDR's huge and long-lasting majorities in Congress and ultimately led to enduring acceptance of the pillars of the welfare state: social security, unemployment insurance, labor protections, bank regulation.

The Pope's swift turns of thought

I knew before this week that the Pope is a man of good will. As I read his speech to Congress, it dawned too that his is a mind of extraordinary subtlety.

He is the opposite of a fundamentalist. He sees the mix of good and evil in all -- in persons, political systems, historical events.  As he speaks, he keeps flipping the Janus head:  Every chastisement is an affirmation. Every affirmation -- of, say, an inherited national virtue -- is a challenge.

The Pope's paragraphs take swift turns.You think he's headed one way, and he goes into reverse -- present to past, praise to reproach, abortion to death penalty.  He sees six sides to everything.

Follow the switchbacks in this passage appealing to our better angels:

Nostalgic bullying

Andrew Sullivan relays complaints from three writers, Leon Wieseltier, Molly Worthen and Rod Dreher, who are uncomfortable with the DIY approaches to religion adopted by many Americans. Worthen expresses the nub of their common complaint. "An institution" such as the Catholic church

forces you to have, for at least part of your life, a respect for authority that inculcates the sense that you have something to learn, that you’re not reinventing the wheel, but that millennia have come before you.

The loss of such authority is in my view a good riddance. On the plane of dogma, it means that those who confuse their close analysis of the fantasies derived from ancient fables with actual knowledge are not fooling anyone but atavists like themselves. On an institutional level, we've learned, or should have learned, that those credited an authority alleged to derive from God are likely to abuse it.