3 ms·

Excellent observation. Can't disagree!

• mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  If you're curious, this observation only became clear to me when I started thinking about politics in a (very loose, hand-wavey) cultural evolutionary framework. I'm sure there's serious theoretical work on this, but I'm not hugely read up on the social sciences. The general idea is that representative democracy can be seen as a sort of evolutionary algorithm, evolving a set of laws and regulations. Think of elections as your fitness test. Whatever things feed into the election results, like debates and media storms can be seen as selective pressures. For a democracy to function you need a healthy multi-party system, healthy independent media, political parties with strong grassroots control internally, a reasonably educated populace, and minimal corruption. All of these make the total selective pressures more aligned with what's best for everyone. If one party gets power for too long, we're essentially overprioritising selective pressures from one subset of society, causing an effective power imbalance that starts to cause more and more problems. I might blog about it since it's a bit complicated to explain years of private, abstract thought like this, but hopefully that was an interesting read anyway.