[dredmorbius]

That's pretty close to the insight I had about a decade ago reading the opening paragraphs of A.H.M. Jones's biography of Augustus.

I've quoted the passage, which describes the political balance and division between the optimates, populares, and equites, roughly the oligarchs, labour, and petit bourgousie, in this (now archived) Reddit post:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230607042525/https://old.reddi...>

The durability of such conflict makes me strongly suspect that this is innate to human polity, and Jones's description of the respective groups' political platforms, concerns, and ideologies strike me as both insightful and possibly innate.

I've mentioned this several times previously on HN:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>