I think you’re overfitting history with your current perspective. It’s so limiting, and mostly a recent phenomenon, to look at the past and politics as just “deciding where the power goes”. Most humans even in the US today don’t care except in how it affects their lives. Peasants likely didn’t care who the king was, or had some deep desire to rule themselves, many were just concerned with crop yields, protecting their family, enjoying life, and so on. Colonists in the US barely cared that they were ruled by a king, at least until they got hit with burdensome taxes.

Politics isn’t about power except secondarily, it’s about determining ones way of life. I don’t think anyone would care if they were ruled by a dictator, as long as that dictator didn’t interfere with how they live their life.

This is important because it seems like you walk away with the idea that conservatives are always about concentrating power and progressives are all about diffusing it. That’s just incorrect. Both have different ways they want to live their life and their policies are a reflection of attempts to change the environment around them to fulfill that vision. If progressive policy didn’t affect conservatives way of life, conservatives wouldn’t care about progressives. The reverse is true.

This framework fits every instance in history and everywhere on Earth for why politics happen: because people want to live their envisioned life.