Partisan Political Systems have a double life as what is visible and what is not. What is not obvious is generally the most interesting (and causally critical) feature.
If a complex information and/or energy-processing (i.e. computational) system maintains sustainable intrinsic homeostatic and extrinsic contextual continuity through the reflexive priming of its environment as a pliable medium for self-propagation, this (but not only this) #political system has fallen into a phase state by and through which the autonomous replication of adversarial, partisan disagreement is not merely the distributed shape and form of the message but is also the flow and pattern of its optimal, successful and continuing tenure in that environment.
It can be difficult to step back and view these systems as being anything but the products of directed volition or subjective human agency. If the individual nodes in a system do not themselves display the features or extremity of the gestalt (macroscopic) system in which they participate, it is probable that some kind of non-agency or non-subjective and autonomously self-propagating, distributed computational system or adaptive pattern and symmetry is at work here.
This is the game that plays itself. Through (all) of us.
Daedelus Kite 