The CCP does a really good job at keeping (enough) of the populace happy so that there is little to no risk of unrest that could affect their power. A main pillar of this is the social benefits of having people employed in particular your points 1 and 2.
Plus they have a really really big stick they don’t hestitate to use. It’s not all carrot by any means, it’s more along the lines of “plomo o plata” with a demonstrable history of going massively overboard with the lead.
In my opinion it's more about removing 'rabble rousers' than keeping people happy. We have a lot of internal strife in the US, but I'd be extremely surprised if all of the upset and discontent was not being fomented by something like 0.1% of the population. This is one thing that bothers me. I value free speech above all, but that comes at a massive price since it, without doubt, can have a major and negative destabilizing force on a nation. Perhaps the solution is not having nations with hundreds of millions of people under one government.
The US grew "organically" into what it is today. The population leans left in more urban areas, and leans right in more rural areas, to varying degrees. This doesn't lend itself to a geographical solution.
I don't think a solution to internal disagreements can or should exist.
I'm not sure what's happened in the US has been entirely organic. There is a tremendous amount to be politically gained by dividing people. Imagine I'm a politician who cares nothing at all except about staying in power. One way to do this is to just do a really good job. But doing a good job is hard, and even harder when I'd like to taste of the fruits of my power on occasion, which tend to make people a bit upset. What am I to do? It's not hard. I completely remove myself from the picture. Instead if I can people completely fear, despise, and hate the other side as much as I possibly can - it works just as well. If I can make people think any alternative to me is just simply evil incarnate, then I can do whatever I want. People will still elect me because I'm 'better than the alternative', an alternative which I make sure becomes reprehensible. I can pick issues that aren't necessarily that important, but do a great job of dividing people - and just focus all my efforts on dividing people along these issues.
And this isn't a one side or the other thing. Division benefits both sides, and so playing up to their villainy works in a nice symbiotic relationship. Both sides in office are playing the exact same game, and they play it very well. There was an email from the DNC leaks from Bill Ivey, former chairman of the national endowment for the arts, to John Podesta [1]. I think he phrased things quite succinctly, "We've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking - and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.".
How many people voted for Clinton thinking, "Yes - I think this politician is somebody that stands for what I truly value and will make a very good president." How many people voted for her because the alternative was completely unthinkable? And similarly for Trump voters. It's not really a conspiracy so much as the fact that politicians obviously have massive full time teams working to min-max elections, and it turns out that getting people really pissed at each other is apparently one of the best ways to do that.
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.
