Newsweek has reported that more than 400 earthquakes have been recorded in and around Yellowstone Park since June 12. The last one (a magnitude three earthquake) occurred this Monday, June 19. The reason why you should lose sleep over these seismic events is Yellowstone Park is a supervolcano. This fact confirmed in the middle of the last century by NASA with a high-altitude camera: the whole park is a volcanic crater. The wonderful geysers, the bubbling of otherwordly mud, and the hot springs beloved by tourists are caused by molten rock below the park.

The last time this volcano exploded was two million years ago. Bill Bryson described the event in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything:

The ash fall from the last Yellowstone eruption covered all or parts of 19 western states (plus parts of Canada and Mexico)—nearly the whole of the United States west of the Mississippi. This, bear in mind, is the breadbasket of America, an area that produces roughly half the world’s cereals. And ash, it is worth remembering, is not like a big snowfall that will melt in the spring. If you wanted to grow crops again, you would have to find some place to put all the ash. It took thousands of workers eight months to clear 1.8 billion tons of debris from the sixteen acres of the World Trade Center site in New York. Imagine what it would take to clear Kansas.

And if this thing blows, it will be so huge, so powerful, so destructive, that capitalism will surely go the way of the dinosaurs. A form of natural socialism will have to emerge. This kind of bleak leftist speculation is called catastrophism—the politics of apocalypse. And it makes some sense if you think about it. As the French economist Thomas Piketty pointed out, social democracy (the kind of socialism Bernie Sanders is fighting for) was not established in West until it through two very destructive world wars and a terrific economic crash.

Today, the US is trapped in this depressing political loop: The right is permitted to go far from the center, but the left—which can win if the right is close to the center, but does not stand a chance if the right is far from it—is not permitted (by both leading parties) to go far from the center. This loop intensified with Trump's rise to power in the penultimate month of 2016; and if one looks at the results of Georgia’s sixth district race, we can see that things are not getting better but worse:

Nov. 8, 2016, Georgia’s sixth district

Donald Trump: 48.3%
Hillary Clinton: 46.8%

2. June 20, 2017, Georgia’s sixth district

Karen Handel: 51.9%
Jon Ossoff: 48.1%

The loop is tightening. It may soon become impossible to break it with tools of normal politics. But if Yellowstone Park explodes...