The establishment political factions motivate their bases with social issues - appealing to their respective tendencies by speaking for or against social progress. The "Conservative" base is motivated by fear, and the "Liberal" base is motivated by morality. The built-in benefit of that is that the conservatives look unenlightened for being motivated by fear, and the liberals look sanctimonious for their moral judgements, (since conservatives consider their morality beyond question - necessary to prop up the rest of their worldview, and a major source of cognitive dissonance). SO, we have Roe v. Wade, racism, poverty, immigration, LGBT issues, voting rights, marijuana, hate, fear, violence, and no matter who's in charge, nobody in the political world ever does anything about any of it, other than tweak around the edges, make things marginally worse, and do a lot of yelling. Thus, everybody spends all their time fighting over social issues.

Meanwhile the policy battle (including war) is lost without a peep.