Right on both counts, that it can't be separated and that it isn't recent. The OP needs to amend "The Guidelines state that political discussion is off-topic". The actual guidelines say most and probably, precisely to indicate not all.
Political articles that are on topic are those that contain material of intellectual interest, aren't just garden-variety politics or ideology, and contain substantive new information. Those are comparatively rare, but better able to support substantive discussion. Sometimes they get more upvotes than flags, or we may turn off the flags. There are plenty of examples of this—so many that we hear the complaint "HN has been taken over by politics" at least as often as its inverse.
I think the greatest possible contribution to all of science that hacker news (the piece of software + the community) could provide would be to extend its general self-reinforcing conversational tone to include issues of conscience and the ethical, moral, and political implications of the subjects discussed here. We simply can't treat the two groups as separate.
That sounds great, but isn't doable. It only seems doable, because of the dynamic described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438476. What would actually happen is that it would make the community nastier and dumber until it died. Whom the gods would destroy, &c.
The fundamental tradeoff: the better HN gets, the more people want to use it for things that worsen it. This puts a cap on how good HN can ever get. All we can do is find ways to wriggle out of that tradeoff here and there.
Political articles that are on topic are those that contain material of intellectual interest, aren't just garden-variety politics or ideology, and contain substantive new information. Those are comparatively rare, but better able to support substantive discussion. Sometimes they get more upvotes than flags, or we may turn off the flags. There are plenty of examples of this—so many that we hear the complaint "HN has been taken over by politics" at least as often as its inverse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426