"All Politics Is Local" -- Extremely Local, As In, In College Students' Pants
The phrase -- "all politics is local" -- is thought to have come from former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill.

But evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller wrote in 1996 about something he experienced while studying psychology as an undergrad at Columbia University -- "political peacocks":

Suddenly, in the spring of 1986 in New York, hundreds of Columbia University students took over the campus adminstration building and demanded that the university sell off all of its stocks in companies that do business in South Africa.

As a psychology undergraduate at Columbia, I was puzzled by the spontaneity, ardour, and near-unanimity of the student demands for divestment. Why would mostly white, mostly middle-class North Americans miss classes, risk jail, and occupy a drab office building for two weeks, in support of political freedom for poor blacks living in a country six thousand miles away?

The campus conservative newspaper ran a cartoon depicting the protest as an annual springtime mating ritual, with Dionysian revels punctuated by political sloganeering about this year's arbitrary cause.

At the time, I thought the cartoon tasteless and patronizing. Now, I wonder if it contained a grain of truth. Although the protests achieved their political aims only inefficiently and indirectly, they did function very effectively to bring together young men and women who claimed to share similar political ideologies. Everyone I knew was dating someone they'd met at the sit-in. In many cases, the ideological commitment was paper-thin, and the protest ended just in time to study for semester exams. Yet the sexual relationships facilitated by the protest sometimes lasted for years.

The hypothesis that loud public advertisements of one's political ideology function as some sort of courtship display designed to attract sexual mates, analogous to the peacock's tail or the nightingale's song, seems dangerous. It risks trivializing all of political discourse, just as the conservative cartoon lampooned the Columbia anti-apartheid protests.

The best way to avoid this pitfall is not to ignore the sexual undertones to human political behavior, but to analyze them seriously and respectfully using the strongest and most relevant theory we have from evolutionary biology: Darwin's theory of sexual selection through mate choice.

...Darwin observed that many animals, especially females, are rather picky about their sexual partners. But why would it ever pay to reject a suitor? Being choosy requires time, energy, and intelligence - costs that can impair survival. The basic rationale for mate choice is that random mating is stupid mating. It pays to be choosy because in a sexually reproducing species, the genetic quality of your mate will determine half the genetic quality of your offspring. Ugly, unhealthy mates usually lead to ugly, unhealthy offspring. By forming a joint genetic venture with an attractive, high-quality mate, one's genes are much more likely to be passed on. Mate choice is simply the best eugenics and genetic screening that female animals are capable of carrying out under field conditions, with no equipment other than their senses and their brains.

...Because mating is a social game in which the attractiveness of a behavior depends on how many other people are already producing that behavior, political ideology evolves under the unstable dynamics of game theory, not as a process of simple optimization given a set of self-interests.

This explains why an entire student body at an American university can suddenly act as if they care deeply about the political fate of a country that they virtually ignored the year before.

The courtship arena simply shifted, capriciously, from one political issue to another, but once a sufficient number of students decided that attitudes towards apartheid were the acid test for whether one's heart was in the right place, it became impossible for anyone else to be apathetic about apartheid. This is called frequency-dependent selection in biology, and it is a hallmark of sexual selection processes.

What can policy analysts do, if most people treat political ideas as courtship displays that reveal the proponent's personality traits, rather than as rational suggestions for improving the world? The pragmatic, not to say cynical, solution is to work with the evolved grain of the human mind by recognizing that people respond to policy ideas first as big-brained, idea-infested, hypersexual primates, and only secondly as concerned citizens in a modern polity.

Welcome to Twitter and social media witch burnings over the slightest, slightest offense -- maybe an obviously unintentional one.

Well, there's an ideological bonfire and it needs to be fed, and without that, how are people going to show off how attractive they are to their "tribe"?

Related observation -- I think -- from Razib Khan:

a lot of stuff about hijabs in my feed. one thing that is hard for me from my background (muslim immigrant family) to internalize is how clearly the hijab is about IDENTITY in the USA. it's modesty function seems secondary. i say this cuz i've see lots of hijabis in yoga pants...

— Razib Khan (@razibkhan) February 3, 2019

Miller via @RobKHenderson