Rather than just any old divisions, politics is increasingly steered toward divisions over things that elites don't actually care about: gun rights, abortion ri

Rather than just any old divisions, politics is increasingly steered toward divisions over things that elites don't actually care about: gun rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, manufactured "religious freedom" debates, "tough on crime" policies, etc. These things actually are important, because regular people do have strong feelings about them, but they matter to elites only to the extent that they can be used to gin up votes without having to dissent on any of the things that they all agree on: killing lots of foreigners with expensive weapons systems, preventing anything resembling a realistic safety net, pro-capital/anti-labor tax and immigration policies, unlimited dark money in politics, etc. First-past-the-post systems like the US make this particularly easy, since third parties have no chance. If policies like universal healthcare and non-interventionist foreign policy are simply never adopted by either party, voters are forced to make their voting choice based on things that at least are different between the two parties, and elites have arranged for these to be things that barely matter to them at all. They don't have to interact with our barely-there social safety net, worry about health insurance, send their sons to die in foreign wars, or tolerate any of the daily parade of indignities that constitute life for working people. In short, it's good strategy to manipulate the poors with cheap rhetoric about the 2nd amendment, so that you don't have to have messy debates about expensive things the elites oppose, like universal healthcare.