A Song of Ice and Fire is primarily notable in the way that it deconstructs fantasy tropes - the righteous hero does not always win and power is more about knowing how to take it than deserving it. It's successful as a series because of the strength of its characters - not only are heroes like Daenerys and Tyrion layered and interesting, but villains like Cersei (mainly Cersei) are also given understandable, if reprehensible, motivations.
But another thing I find really interesting is how this medieval fantasy drama that borrows heavily from British history (the Red Wedding is based on a real event called the Black Dinner that happened in Scotland) also draws very strong parallels with current events in America.
GRRM is an American author, and I think Americans have an interesting relationship with medieval Europe. In a way, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas (well, not counting the Vikings) was the end of the medieval era. As a country, many of us can look back to ancestors who lived through feudal societies, but our government was founded in part to prevent the problems of the feudal system from troubling us. If the Enlightenment was the intellectual movement that pulled Europe out of the middle ages, the US was founded to embody those new ideals.
Obviously, there have been failures in that regard, but Martin has done a great job of creating allegories of events from the last fifty years in his dragon-and-ice-zombie-filled fantasy world.
Let's take Daenerys' conquest of Slaver's Bay. You could easily draw this as a parallel to the Iraq War. Now, her conquest actually predates both 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as that happens in A Storm of Swords (2000.) However, we next find out how the occupation of Mereen is going in 2011 in A Dance with Dragons, which shows that conquest is one thing, but nation-building is a whole other thing.
Daenerys' conquest feels pretty unequivocally good - the three city-states of Slaver's Bay are built on... well, slavery. Daenerys has picked up a strong moral compass somewhere (perhaps the domination by her brother gave her some idea of what it felt like not to be in control of one's life) and decides to eradicate the institution of slavery. She's got a clear villain in the slavers, just as we had a clear villain in Saddam Hussein (and as false as the stated motivations for invading Iraq were, I'd never argue Hussein was a good guy.)
But actually occupying Mereen, she finds that the situation is a lot more complicated. There is a whole system of factions in place and she learns that just because you toppled a corrupt system does not mean that good will inevitably prevail. While the show has, at this point, left Mereen in seemingly good hands, the book has left off with the city in chaos. You've got the Sons of the Harpy, for example, who could be called terrorists, but view themselves as freedom fighters. They are, after all, resisting a foreign occupation. It's not even clear that the Sons of the Harpy are really the same people who supported the Masters, and for all we know, they could have been some radical faction the Masters were keeping subdued.
There's also the problem of an exit strategy. Daenerys is more or less using Mereen as a dry run to learn how to rule a civilization. But first of all, that means that she is explicitly putting the value of Mereen and its people as less than those of Westeros. It also means that she's going to leave at some point, so the whole cult of personality she's developed needs to be transferred to some local leader who can be trusted to keep things from descending into chaos. Good luck with that.
The Lannisters are Old Money. They're traditional conservatives in a lot of way - they have a great deal of wealth and power, and they consider this a mandate to do with that wealth and power what they will. The Lannisters consider themselves better than basically anyone else, which is part of the reason why Tyrion's black sheep antics (not to mention his physical condition) is a glaring reminder of how false this narrative is.
With Joffrey and Tywin dead, the latter at the hands of Tyrion, and with the Tyrells moving in and proving far more popular with the people because of the aid that they're providing (I wouldn't go so far as to call the Tyrells socialists, but they are freely giving food to starving poor people, something that wouldn't even occur to Cersei,) Cersei makes the decision to embrace religious fundamentalists. The "Sparrows" are almost the polar opposites of the Lannisters - nameless, poor, extremely religious. The wars waged by the Lannisters have left a lot of the common people impoverished and desperate for some feeling of strength and power, not to mention food and care.
And the High Sparrow is providing these people with something. Cersei makes the calculation that these religious populists would be a powerful check to the Tyrells' liberal generosity (something she views, probably not incorrectly, as a way to grab power.)
By drumming up support for the Sparrows, Cersei does manage to score against her theoretical enemies (people who to any sane person would seem like useful allies) but she winds up getting utterly screwed as the Sparrows and the newly empowered Faith Militant swiftly grow too powerful to control. Soon, Cersei is finding herself under their control, and forced to do her humiliating Walk of Shame.
This is basically what Nixon and Reagan did to the Republican Party. Liberal programs like the New Deal had empowered liberal democrats in the United States as the American economy had flourished in the middle of the century. Nixon capitalized on racist sentiments in the South to transform a huge swath of former Dixiecrats into loyal Republican voters. This process would continue with Reagan as the Republican party embraced the Religious Right - a fringe group that before then had had very little influence in American politics. Nixon and Reagan were both representatives of the old "Captains of Industry" style of conservatism - one that wanted lower taxes and greater freedom for big business to thrive and run things.
But now look at the 2016 election. A year ago, the safe bet was that Jeb Bush was going to be the nominee for the Republican Party, continuing this corporate party leadership that we saw with his brother W and their dad in the late 80s/early 90s. Not only did Jeb lose the nomination, he dropped out pretty early. The Republican party tried to rally around someone with classical conservative values, but even though Marco Rubio stayed in for a while, he ultimately was a distant third to religious fundamentalist Ted Cruz and gasbag and potential fascist Donald Trump. Just like Cersei, they found a populist figure for people on their side of the political spectrum to rally around, but in doing so, they cut themselves out of the loop.
Finally, let's talk about the White Walkers. The world is consumed in political maneuvering, with various people claiming their right to take the throne and all trying to manipulate or double-cross each other to get their hands on power.
But in the background, there's a far bigger issue. One that is associated with shifting temperatures and could be an existential threat to human life.
The Night's Watch is a tiny fragment of what it once was, and no one really cares about it because it's there to protect us from things that most people don't even believe exists. Even when evidence is presented to those in power, like when Alliser Thorne shows up in King's Landing with wight's hand in a jar, people don't believe him.
The problem seems to be occurring elsewhere, and so people don't think it's a problem.
You know, kind of like climate change.
Despite the fact that the scientific community overwhelmingly believes that climate change is A. largely the result of human activity and B. will have devastating longterm effects on the planet, there is a huge portion of our political leadership that isn't even arguing about what steps we should take to deal with it, but is actually arguing that the problem doesn't even exist.
This despite the fact that we've known about the dangers of global warming and climate change for over fifty years and the whole reason the Night's Watch was established in the first place was to deal with the White Walkers.
So while you've got people like Donald Trump arguing that the biggest danger to America is Mexican immigrants and you've got people like Cersei Lannister who believe the top priority for the Seven Kingdoms is to ensure that the Lannisters don't cede any power whatsoever to anyone else, even their allies, there's this massive threat that could make all such concerns totally moot.
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