I mean if the 1970's southern conservative Democrats were like the Democrats of the past that fought tooth and nail to keep black people from having any say, do you honestly think they'd of joined up with the Republicans, the very party that formed on the basis of stopping the spread of slavery and grew on it's lack of support for the southern prejudice and on black equality? I think they would have just started their own party in competition with Democrats and Republicans.
By contrast, if a closed system is far from equilibrium, its entropy will increase dramatically, which can compensate for a substantial entropy decrease of a local system. Thus, ordered structures are more likely to be created from a non-equilibrium state than an equilibrium state.
