It does, you just have to dress it up correctly. You have incentives to want people to be personally weak and historically ignorant, but still able to shuffle

It does, you just have to dress it up correctly. You have incentives to want people to be personally weak and historically ignorant, but still able to shuffle papers and make new widgets to make gdp line go up. It's in your best interests for the country to despise you, and the other half to despise your counterpart- so that both halves despise each other and can't coordinate toward their common interests. You want the subgroups motivated to vote for your side by problems they face to keep voting for your side next time around, so you're incentivized to make a big show of trying to fix their problems, but not actually fix them and blame the failure on the other side. And when the day is done, you and the opposition leader can have a drink in your mansion. This is all evil in a molochian sense, and it all makes sense.