Is the body politic broken?

James Fallows thinks so. He debunks the notion that one side is weak, the other side is crazy, and therefore it all evens out somehow. "It's far worse than that," he writes. "The major parts of our political establishment are both showing operational pathologies that each make the other's failings worse, rather than somehow buffering each other toward a harmonious best-of-both-worlds compromise result. For instance, the (wholly needless and destructive) fight over the debt ceiling apparently did even more damage to the Republican 'brand' than it did to Obama's. But the real problem is how much it damaged the country's economic prospects and the image-and-reality of the American system's ability to function."