On June 10, 2000, London opened the Millennium Footbridge, a futuristic pedestrian path spanning the River Thames, hanging between suspension cables that was designed to look like a ribbon of steel. But as a steady stream of people began to flow across the new bridge, it began to wobble alarmingly from side to side.
Engineers figured out the problem: The bridge was designed for pedestrians who moved randomly along the bridge, their individual movements canceling each other out. But in crowds, people fall naturally into pace with each other, and as they did, their synchronous steps caused bigger and bigger swings of the bridge. The city shut it down after only two days for an expensive revamp.
I’ve had unstable structures on my mind lately.
My recent Times Magazine story was a deep dive into the game theory of democracy: what keeps the democratic equilibrium in place, and what causes it to wobble off balance, or collapse entirely. As I reported the piece, I began imagining the different democratic systems as suspension bridges, with checks and balances as their cables. What happens when pressure pushes the suspension out of balance, or even into complete collapse?
In Hungary, for example, a quirk of the country’s constitution ended up handing Prime Minister Viktor Orban a supermajority in parliament, and with it the ability to amend the constitution more or less at will. Orban used that authority to insulate himself from electoral challenges and dismantle liberal democracy, turning the courts and media into instruments of his power, rather than checks on it.
And in Venezuela, the democratic equilibrium was catastrophically weakened by a supreme court decision early in the presidency of Hugo Chávez. He had announced a referendum asking citizens to vote on replacing the constitution — a measure that appeared to be illegal, because it violated the existing procedures for constitutional amendments.
But the court went along with Chávez’s referendum, paving the way for him to gain control over Venezuela’s major institutions. He held power for 14 years, until his death. His handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro, is still in office.
Now let’s take a look at the United States. Vice President Kamala Harris staked her campaign on the idea that democracy was on the ballot, and that a vote for former and future President Donald J. Trump could lead to its demise. I’m sure you’ve seen how that turned out this week.
To be clear, the United States is unlikely to experience a collapse exactly like those of Hungary or Venezuela. For one thing, the U.S. constitution is notoriously difficult to amend.
But it may be very vulnerable to a different type of destabilization, one that comes from the political equivalent of the crowds walking in lock step on the wobbling Millennium Bridge.
Moving in lock step
The U.S. political system is designed to work a bit like the out-of-sync pedestrians the bridge’s engineers anticipated: many independent institutions and constituencies pushing in different directions, their opposing forces canceling each other out to keep the overall system stable. Power is divided not just among the three branches of government at the federal level, but among 50 state governments as well.
“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison wrote in the Federalist papers, explaining why checks and balances were a necessary bulwark against tyranny.
For much of the country’s history, U.S. institutions were distinctly out of lock step. In addition to the formal separation of powers, state-level parties, media outlets, and other institutions created crosscutting pressures, forcing presidents to put together broad coalitions in order to govern.
That began to change with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws, which triggered a long-term realignment in American politics, write Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler in their new book “Partisan Nation.” Over the next few decades, politics became more nationalized, as Republicans and Democrats began to polarize around sharply different ideological identities and compete for control over the increasingly powerful federal government.
Those same forces began to bring political institutions that were designed as counterbalances into lock step. Partisan pressures, like the crowds on the bridge, grew stronger as they become more synchronous.
State political parties now function more like chapters of national parties than like separate organizations with their own agendas, Pierson and Schickler write. Issue groups have become part of partisan coalitions rather than sources of crosscutting outside pressures. The media environment has polarized as well, with right-wing partisan media developing into an ecosystem that is largely separate from mainstream outlets like The Times, The Washington Post, or CNN.
That partisan “teamsmanship,” they write, has undermined the different branches’ incentives to check each other. Politicians now face strong pressures to support members of their own party and oppose the other side. That undermines the effectiveness of tools like impeachment: If legislators will only impeach politicians from the opposing side, it becomes just another means of increasing partisan pressure rather than a restraint on excessive power grabs.
Over the same period, courts have become more overtly politicized, making them an additional vector of partisan pressure rather than a check against it. American courts still uphold the rule of law, but when judges are selected and promoted based on their political beliefs and loyalties, that inevitably brings a partisan slant to their decisions as well. That has ratcheted up the stakes of politics even further, because winning the presidency and Senate now carries the additional benefit of controlling a politicized judicial nomination process.
The United States is not Hungary or Venezuela. The American democratic equilibrium has thus far withstood the forces of polarization. But Trump will come back into the presidency into a system that is, in effect, already beginning to rock back and forth.
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