Chaos theory states that the most stable of systems rely on peripheral instabilities to keep them stable. This is akin to driving a car, with your hands creating small movements with the steering wheel. these small kinetic movements allow you to quickly adjust to sudden external changes if need be. Every system needs a kind of built-in instability to remain stable and flexible enough should it need to adjust to new realities.
In political systems, the most successful are those that allow for small directional shifts when needed. Democratic systems with voting cycles allow for these small shifts.
A government leans too far to the left, the populace brings it back to the right in a subsequent voting cycle. It then leans too far to the right, and the opposite occurs. It is these small adjustments - these small built in instabilities - that allow democratic governments to sustain themselves though times of necessary change.
There has been some noted writing of late related to what happens to societies when they lose this ability to change. Two books of note are Jared Diamond's "Collapse" which discusses and analyses the trail of quite vibrant societies throughout human history that have quite suddenly and violently collapsed quickly within only one or two generations. Most of these societies as its turned out faced a similar kind of enviromental collapse where the plants, animals or minerals that it had learned to depend upon became all used up, and that society could not adjust rapidly enough to find alternative resources.
Not all societies have collapsed, obviously. Many make the changes necessary to move in new resource directions, before their time runs out.
Another interesting book is called "Dark Age Ahead" by Jane Jacobs which goes a little deeper into why a political process might lose its natural ability to fluctuate. She calls two of these fluctuations "Logos" - looking ahead- and "Mythos" - looking behind. She analyses past societies and argues that dark ages are often preceeded by a political process where either Mythos or Logos are no longer in sync, and the political powers that be have pressed harder on the one rather than the other - to a point where even when the populace attempts to readjust these processes, it finds that the legislative levers have all been redacted. This inability to adjust to new situations creates societal stagnation which then leads to collapse.
We live is a time of projected psychological cataclysm. It seems that everyone is expecting something to happen. Both religion and politics have become polarized to a point where there is little middle ground for anyone to maneuver anymore. We are facing growing scarcity in our resources - oil, water, food. Clean air. All this at a time when our political process needs to be flexible, only the opposite is happening. We are instead finding the levers of the political process all being pressed on one side, so that we cannot move forward anymore with any real flexibility.
The fix is in. Mythos is taking hold of all the levers, and god help us if we cannot wrest them back in time to avoid collapse.