Political False Dichotomies: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by Caitlin Johnstone

You may vote and debate freely on any issue which does not affect the functioning of the empire. When it comes to how money, weapons and resources move around the world, however, you suddenly find that your votes don't matter and your position has no mainstream representation. They'll let you argue until you're blue in the face over whether or not you can have an abortion or whether minorities should have civil rights; they'll even let you vote on it. But things like military expansionism and neoliberal globalization and deregulation are off limits.

The empire relies on false political dichotomies like Democrats vs Republicans to keep everyone fighting over issues which don't affect the functioning of the empire so the machine can trudge onward uninterrupted by the local riff raff. That is the entire job of those parties. 

The mainstream media exist to keep everyone spellbound by those false dichotomies on the level of discourse and debate. They manufacture culture wars which split the populace in half over an issue which doesn't affect the empire, then continually feed into that debate.

The Bernie/AOC/TYT "populist left" and the Trump/Tucker Carlson "populist right" factions are there to lure parts of the population who get a little too curious about the raw mechanisms of empire back into the political false dichotomy so they stop asking unauthorized questions.

The entire political/media class exists for this purpose: not to help people, not to fight for civil rights, not to create a well-informed populace so that democracy can function, but to keep the grubby little mitts of the unwashed masses far away from the true levers of power. That's their whole entire function.

Reading by Tim Foley.