No state has the power to prevent revolution. Historicaly, over-powered states tend to fall the fastest. State power can't prevent the shit from hitting the fan. All it can do is hold it back so the quantity is larger. Compare the fates of the last Communist leaders of Romania and East Germany.

That's what makes elections important. They provide a mechanism for relatively cheap (as opposed to the expenses involved in civil wars and coups) controlled revolutions. They absorb the revolutionary energy. The Constitution provides something like slippery geology - the earthquakes are rarely large.

But when elections become meaningless exercises, the geology gets brittle - the earthquakes get harsh. Without the regular release of a meaningful election, the revolutionary energy builds to dangerous levels.

Worse yet, the more that is involved in the power structure, the more that gets broken in an uncontrolled revolution. In the wave of anti-monarchy revolutions two hundred years ago, the over-involved religions took serious hits. Catholicism has yet to fully recover. Protestantism, which wasn't quite so tied to the old power structures, was less damaged. And politicaly marginal religions (Quakers, for example) were unaffected.

Everything tightly involved in the power structure goes up against the wall. Consider the consequences for the economy when the major economic players go there - look at Russia. Doesn't matter whether the state owns the means of production or the means of production own the state. When they are a single unit and that unit breaks, it just ain't pretty.

Unfortunately, I see the pressure building.