Jeff Russell

1. Glad you enjoyed it! I think the "family drama angle" has been played up to fit the saga genre, but I agree, it makes much of it better, especially the prequels!

2. Oh, sure, I largely agree most, maybe even darn-near-all abstract thinking is not helpful to getting things done politically, but I read Spengler as making the far stronger claim that academics, philosophers, or other "thinkers" have never, and can never, say anything that can or will have any relevance in the conduct of politics. This seems transparently false. One example: along with all of the practical, historical examples used, the US Founding Fathers were heavily influenced by John Locke, and to a lesser degree, Adam Smith, in how they set up the government.

3. I agree that under most circumstances, a democracy or representative republic will tend to shake out into two parties (you get a bit more variation in parliamentary systems, with coalition-forming, but usually there's fairly stable "sides"), and that the push and pull between those usually has a centralizing effect. You can get some problems, though, when the two sides become different enough, and/or when there is a sizable enough minority within each party that is harder-lined and insists on not compromising and going toward the middle. These folks are often the most likely to vote, the most likely to vote in primaries (in systems with those), and the most likely to contribute money to campaigns, so they can end up pulling the party more toward them. The whole "playing to the base" trope, basically. If both parties get far enough toward this, it can make finding, much less enacting, the actual "center" of opinion much harder.

Oh, and all of the above assumes that the elected officials are actually running the show, and not unelected bureaucratic or administrative entities.