I think there's context of specific eras of US history that could improve this.

For contemporary US most of these work pretty well. I think the main faction in Fury Road is a good analog to consider too.

Illogical patriotism of the serfs is also a strong hallmark. Thinly veiled to conspicuous racism is another that highlights the spectrum of false consciousness under the surface of the patriotism. Corrupt guilds that supply the military with ineffective supplies would also really work well.

Hospitals and schools being small private institutions exclusively serving the rich nobility is kind of inherent to the feudal mode of production tbh

It takes a long fucking time to make a doctor or professor especially when every book has to be copied by hand

i remember being given some baby's first anthropology essay in elementary school and they were writing about how weird Nacirema culture was.

Have you read Malazan: Book of the Fallen? The Lether Empire is only introduced in the 5th book but it's capitalist to its bones and expands by incorporating and "civilizing" tribal neighbors for the sake of profit. They favor opening bombardments of artillery like magic. Highly recommend the whole series, world building alone is great.

Edit: for your world, you also want some oil analogue too. Also straight up plantation slavery. Probably also design it as a loose confederation of kingdoms/lordships with geographic diversity but only surface level cultural distinctions. I really like the eagle bombardment idea, make sure they are extravagantly expensive to breed and maintain. Maybe show some peasants losing their land for an eagle habitat. Roads and bridges should be massive but crumbling in the current era because lords refuse to pay taxes to maintain them.

just use a Roman Empire analog

One of their big things has to be like a break from monarchy and anti- monarchist iconoclasm only for the founders to be raised up to semi deific proportions. Maybe even a mountain with their faces on it? nah that'd be an insane level of worship

A quasi-religious process for state decision making that they claim means the decisions they make aren’t a reflection of their agenda, but rather are divinations of the process, and they are merely but pass-throughs for that holy ruling.

Captures both that evangelical apologia of “I didn’t choose to deny queer people their rights, I’m just doing what the Bible says,” and that liberal attitude of “our particular implementation of democratic ideals is the true one.”

The culture should venerate the idea of social mobility but in reality be an ossified social structure with a quasi-nobility running everything of note. Sure some random peasant manages to build his smithing side hustle into a successful horse-shoeing business but he has to buy his raw materials from the Mining Guild which has been run by House Musc for half-a-dozen generations (it's totally democratic though, it just happens they're really good at running the mines, definitely no nepotism or backdoor deals)

The Years of Apocalypse has one in Akana Praediar. It's a time loop story and they spend basically the first third of the story bombing a school in every loop.

First thought was Andoran from Pathfinder's Golarian worldsetting

Some I've thought of since posting –

• Other cultures are thousands of years old, they are 200 and brash.
• phrases like "We are the greatest nation on Earth", "We're Number One" can be directly transferred
• They are a rich country, and use their wealth to corrupt overseas regimes, influence them to privatise
• Their spies have funded rebels in other countries and orchestrated coups
• lumberjacks, used to be fur trappers and gold prospectors
• 1% of their population enslaved in prisons on flimsy pretexts
• core myth "we are a union of free states, who defend liberty and our way of life, and spread freedom to others"
• Fast food chains with brand-names could actually work in a mediæval type setting: a large financial interest owns them and makes the food the same everywhere. Result = obesity.

In Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter, the elves who rule Faerie are always at risk of sublimating away; they must inflict as much pathos and involve themselves in as much drama and vice as they can to tether themselves to the mortal world.

The titular Iron Dragons are the equivalent of bombers, powered by viciously intelligent spirits from the elemental plane of fire, who have voluntarily enslaved themselves to the elvish MIC in order to have a chance to consume something (there is nothing left to burn on their home plane).

Since cold iron is lethally toxic to elves, human children are abducted from Earth and changelings are left in their place. The human children grow up working in factories that handle iron, including the ones which build the dragon airframes, and then are used to breed half-elves, who are raised in officer school to pilot the dragons.

All the content warnings for anyone considering reading it.

big lacquered wagons

You could look toward the Empire of Man and the Brettonians from warhammer fantasy for a little inspiration.

Empire of Man is more holy roman empire coded, while the other is more Feudalist high medieval coded. Still both have aspects of the things you're discussing.

A more scifi approach would be empire of Man from Warhammer 40k.

Careful not to get lost in the lore.

New Crobuzon (I think that's the spelling) from Perdido st. Station and its sequels by China Mieville is a good example in a less conventional fantasy setting.

oh I have a good one:

they have free and fair, democratic elections, where the people are free to elect whatever ruler they choose

there are two royal bloodlines

the people choose between the two

The Flesheater courts from Warhammer. A cult of bloodthirsty ghouls who fully believe they are noble knights

I was making the enemies of my next D&D campaign a stand-in for the US empire, so I'll be watching this thread with great interest.

My own ideas involved having them use dragons to represent the US's dominating air power, like the Targaryens on Game of Thrones. I also like the idea of them being more advanced politically, maybe a magna carta-like thing to give nobles more power over the royal leaders, that they use to flaunt their superiority over other kingdoms, while basically still being ruled by the rich over the poor.

I just thought of it now inspired by this thread, but maybe they also allow people to buy their way into nobility, which they use as a marker of social mobility. It's another thing to show their liberal/progressive credentials to other places or people, while in actuality inequality has been increasing and social mobility has been decreasing from those who have reached the top that have been squeezing the people below them, essentially kicking the ladder away.

So a fat version of Spartans from 300?

I have just learned that there's iron crossbow-types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheiroballistra

Normal guys: normal wooden crossbows

Seppos: big iron crossbows