The march of conservative folly

In her great popular work "The March of Folly," the late historian Barbara Tuchman wrote about the habits of mind of six Renaissance popes that helped provoke the Reformation. Note the part I've highlighted below:

Illusion of permanence, of the inviolability of their power and status, was a third folly. The incumbents assumed that the Papacy was forever; that challenges could always be suppressed by Inquisition, excommunication and the stake; that the only real danger was the threat of superior authority in the form of a Council, which needed only to be fended off or controlled to leave them secure. No understanding of the protest, no recognition of their own unpopularity or vulnerability, disturbed the six minds. Their view of the interests of the institution they were appointed to govern was so short-sighted as to amount almost to perversity.

...Their three outstanding attitudes -- obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constitutents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status -- are persistent aspects of folly. While in the case of the Renaissance popes, these were bred in and exaggerated by the surrounding culture, all are independent of time and recurrent in governorship.

Indeed. It's human nature, and the in the nature of power elites and the bureaucracies and hierarchies they command. It was only the disaster of the Reformation that sobered up the Roman hierarchy, and brought about the Counter-Reformation. In our profane political world today, one wonders how many more routs the conservatives will endure before the leadership understands what's happening, and reorganize to seize the political and cultural initiative. I had predicted a recriminations melee on the Right, but Ross, as it's turning out, was more correct to say that nothing's going to happen just right now, because the people who run the institutions and activist groups have too much to lose if they start to turn on each other.

What's going to cause the break?