I'm both a physician and someone who has had significant life threatening and incapacitating illnesses. A few comments.

Yes, do be there. But as someone who has been so incapacitated that it took all my strength to sit up and eat in a hospital bed without getting significantly short of breath, use your common sense. As a patient in the hospital it's amazing how you somehow feel you have to play the host. So if you do visit me, say I'm just here to be with you, I'll just sit here and I don't expect you to do anything. That's enough for me as a patient. You can place your hand on my arm, if appropriate.

Let me sleep. Let me wake and see you still there. That's really all I want you to do. If silence is uncomfortable, then send me a truly personal note or something humorous, but only if you know me well. I've kept the notes and cards people sent and still pull them out when I need a pick-me-up. When I get home, do bring soup.

I agree that having friends available to help in the long run are invaluable, but they are rare. Count yourself lucky if you have one or two. And remember, everyone in the family is struggling too.

Not only shouldn't you say "you'll get over it", whatever you do, please don't offer your advice on how to deal with my problem -- however much you think I would benefit. I'm worried enough. I need confidence in those caring for me. If I need help, I'll ask. I promise.

And if faith doesn't always provide answers, it often provides hope. I hope that helps.

So where is the direct threat to the US? Why are we at war AGAIN? The entire region has a 2,000+ year history of petty warlords who rise up, conquer land, brutalize their population and then collapse. We were in Iraq for over 10 years, the minute we left both the government and army folded like a house of cards. No one has made a difference in the region, not US, the British, the Ottomans, etc., etc. We need to walk away and leave them to their own fate.

We should be spending our trillions on improving the lives of our people at home. For this kind of money we could have:

Ended hunger in the US
Ended homelessness in the US
Rebuilt every run down school in the US
Revived the economy in the US
Fully funded ObamaCare
Fully funded the pension plan of every city and company in the US

Mr. President, when is it our turn for an aid package?
When will you put the US first?
Isn't making us successful your job?
When are you going to start?

I would add that the Catholic Church, in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, was itself a totalitarian system. It is striking that Douthat exempts this example of our susceptibility to totalitarian regimes even as he laments it. A global religion is not a contrast to Fascism and Communism - it is an example of the same thing. In between these bouts of concentrated power may come brief summers of decentralization, but it is hard to argue that there has ever been an extended period in any society where more than a few individuals held all the cards. The US may have experienced a period of balanced power between the election of FDR up to the election of Ronald Reagan, when unions were strong, and our culture and tax structure helped to keep the beast on a leash. If so it has long since waned, and delusions about their own "individuality" among twenty-somethings surely help our burgeoning plutocracy more than harm it.

This piece was smart. One point to add (or maybe it was implicit):

There's a fair amount of sentimentalism, even masculine self-pity, in the elegiac attitude toward patriarchy in the three TV shows you've singled out. Yes, it may signal the actual fading of patriarchy. But it could also indicate the tendency of patriarchy, still very much alive, to feel sorry for itself.

This sense of loss would not be so much a testament to an actual event but rather a permanent feature of patriarchal authority, whose underside is a feeling of insecurity, or an endless mourning for a fictional time of "how things used to be" (i.e. we men used to have all the cards, but now we're under attack, etc.). This would be the complementary obverse of Fiedler's perception of the permanent male adolescence of American literature.

One last thing to add to your thoughts about critically acclaimed TV shows. I like "The Americans" so much because it's about adults dealing with decidedly adult problems and ambiguities. Just as crucially, it's about two adults, a woman and a man, who view their situation sometimes in the same way, but often very differently.

Politically, this could be bad for Democrats in 2016. Oregon, a liberal Democratic stronghold, recently trounced a ballot measure that would have issued "Driver Cards" to illegal residents, by a margin of more than two-to-one. That was legislation already passed in the Democratic state legislature and signed into law by the Democratic governor, undone by huge margins in a decidedly liberal state. A liberal state that legalized marijuana in the same election. I think the media and some Democratic lawmakers are mis-reading the opinions of liberal voters, who stay quiet about their true misgivings on the rampant illegal immigration taking place, for fear of being labeled "racist".