Almost all of modern-day politics revolve around one key idea in evolution. Let me explain why.
As always, let me start off by making a sweeping generalization. In the modern times we can usually put people, politically speaking, into two different buckets: conservative or liberal. There may be others, but they are usually just different flavors of these two groups. Conservatives, generally speaking, believe things are good the way they are – they prefer little change to the social structure. Liberals, on the other hand, are never happy – they always dream of a better world, and work fervently to get us there. The balance of the two of these is what makes good political order. If one side becomes too powerful, things become imbalanced, and what you end up getting is at best a status quo and at worst a few years (or decades!) of political strife.
This last point I think is why it’s important to understand the fundamental principle of why politics is the way it is. You need to have both sides of this coin in order for society to function. And this coin is, of course, evolution.
What does politics have to do with evolution? Well, think about what I said. Conservatives think things are good the way they are – they don’t think we should evolve, or otherwise evolve more slowly. Liberals always dream of a better world – they want us to evolve at a faster rate.
It’s ironic, for politics to take on the form of evolution before most politicians even believed evolution was real. To be fair, this is more a form of cultural evolution, but evolution nonetheless. The balance of these two forces develops the mutation rate. If the mutation rate becomes too slow, or too fast, chaos ensues. Because of this, a bit of (healthy) disagreement among a Republican and a Democrat goes a long way.
