Remember when rich people were so worried about Jeremy Corbyn raising their taxes that they spent months pretending to believe he was a closet Nazi? They really committed to the bit, too. You weren't even allowed to call it a bit because they'd start saying you're a Nazi for defending a Nazi. It was wild.

1. Use narrative manipulation to divide the population into a roughly 50/50 ideological split. 

2. Ensure you control both of those factions.

3. Convince everyone that the only reason nothing changes is because their half of the population doesn't win enough elections.

Everyone's pulling on a rope that doesn't lead anywhere and doesn't do anything, convinced by powerful manipulators that they're engaged in a life-or-death tug o' war match of existential importance. Meanwhile the powerful just do as they like, completely indifferent to that spectacle and its back-and-forth exchanges.