People's brains change as they age. There are definite differences between the way older people and younger people think. This isn't a generalization about old people having bad politics, but rather a comment on the tendency of people's minds to be harder to change over time.
Personally, I think one of the biggest challenges to transitioning to a low-birthrate, ultra-long-lived society is that a constant influx of young blood seems to be a necessary engine for new ideas and progress. There's a combination of not knowing better[1] and not having as much to lose that makes young people more willing to take big risks and push for more egalitarian societies over time. Left to their own devices, accumulation of wealth and status tend to ossify people's belief systems and reduce their incentives to throw everything out and start over.
[1] by this I mean not having the same accumulated beliefs about what is best. Sometimes those beliefs turn out to be unfounded, and you discover that by challenging them.
Personally, I think one of the biggest challenges to transitioning to a low-birthrate, ultra-long-lived society is that a constant influx of young blood seems to be a necessary engine for new ideas and progress. There's a combination of not knowing better[1] and not having as much to lose that makes young people more willing to take big risks and push for more egalitarian societies over time. Left to their own devices, accumulation of wealth and status tend to ossify people's belief systems and reduce their incentives to throw everything out and start over.
[1] by this I mean not having the same accumulated beliefs about what is best. Sometimes those beliefs turn out to be unfounded, and you discover that by challenging them.