When the empire produces a generation of people who cannot afford housing, who carry unpayable student debt, who work three jobs with no healthcare, who are one medical bill from destitution...
And those people are still the most reliable defenders of the empire...
You are not looking at a failure of the ideology.
You are looking at its masterpiece.
The ideology does not need your material wellbeing.
It needs your identification.
And you can be broke, medically uninsured, evicted, and still experience the world through a passport that whispers, in a thousand small ways, that you are better than the people on the other side of the border.
The empire gave you nothing that keeps you warm at night.
But it gave you the feeling.
And the feeling turned out to be enough.
To keep voting. To keep defending. To keep directing your anger at the people below you and the foreigners outside you.
And never quite at the people above you who designed the whole arrangement and are laughing, in their way, at how well it holds.