mango win America’s Wobbly Democracy

On June 10, 2000mango win, 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.

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