One side is clearly interested in helping others simply because they need help. The other is clearly interested in help others that they can relate to (look like themselves) and have earned the right to help (such as believing in the right god.) or only helping people that can help them back.
There's a fundamental disagreement among people on what "help" really is.
Giving money to someone who could otherwise work is very different from giving food to a single mother who is already working 10 hours a day. Giving needles to a drug addict "helps" them in a certain way, yes. But it also enables their addiction to continue.
Yea it's easy for everyone to say "I believe in helping people!!". But which side of the fence you sit on in the US is non-trivially determined by what you believe "help" looks like in practice.
Giving needles keeps someone alive potentially. Until they can get more help for the addiction. Long term. Keeping the needles away makes increases the chances the druggie will die. Short term.
The needles is really a distraction. It is a very narrow special case.
Let’s talk healthcare. One side believes everyone should have the right to at least a minimum level of help regardless of who that person is. The other side believes everyone should receive at most the minimum level of care commiserate with the ability to pay. (Earned the help.)
It's scary how blind people are to this. The right wing wants to help people in the long term and the left wing wants to help people in the short term. Both approaches seem obviously wrong to adherents of the other because they both disadvantage the group that the other wants to help.
Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people. That's a characterization both sides use against each other because they refuse to understand each other.
> The right wing wants to help people in the long term
That sounds overly generous. It seems more like the right believes in social darwinism and feels like it benefits society overall by ridding us of lower quality people. The left believes there should be a fundamental minimum standard for existence that all members of society are entitled to.
> The left believes there should be a fundamental minimum standard for existence that all members of society are entitled to.
I believe we should do this because if we are the greatest nation in the world, we should be able to do this. The greatest nation in the world should be unlike any other nation. An inspiration. A wonder.
> The right wing wants to help people in the long term
> Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people
Garbage. Mitch McConnell was on-record as saying during the Obama years that Republicans would be blocking any legislation from his administration that they could "even if it benefited the American people in any way" (his words, not mine) just so they could say it was a "do-nothing Presidency".
> The right wing wants to help people in the long term and the left wing wants to help people in the short term.
The right-wing wants to narrow the concentration of power and increase inequality and rigidity of social heirarchy, the left-wing wants to increase the distribution of power and decrease inequality and rigidity of social heirarchy.
Each side views their orientation as being what helps people (or, at least, the people who should be helped) in the long term, and usually the short term as well.
If there are ANY people the right wing wants to help, it's rich people and grifters, and "long term" to them is like 3 months. Sorry, but the current admin IS "just bad" and DOES want to harm people - see ICE.
Try thinking of honest examples. If you can't, you're not competent to have thoughts about the topic because you will only be able to feel emotions and pretend they're thoughts.
Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are. And we can even falsify this hypothesis a bit... such people would, I speculate, be more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping. They'll tend to arrange the help in such a way as to garner the most publicity. And, most of all, they'll allocate their efforts such that they're vocal about how they're the good guys doing all the helping more than they're actively helping. Just to make sure everyone notices.
> Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are
Being awesome because you help those in need? How horrible!
> more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping
This is a common and tired talking point: "virtue signalling". It often comes from people who are less helpful than others, and resent how more helpful people receive accolades. Their own personal judgement about whether something actually helps isn't authoritative, and is usually motivated reasoning anyways.
> their voters prioritize making people they don't like suffer over their own comfort.
> That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.
Those are the (sizeable) subset who are obsessed with a literal interpretation of the Old Testament rather than the turn-the-other-cheek teachings of Christ, who is little more than a totem for these fundamentalists.
Arguably there is less harm in believing that Christ's ministry was historical than believing that Sodom and Gomorrah were historical.
"Two thousand years ago there was this dude saying 'Be excellent to one another'" is certainly less dangerous, but to be fair the same dude described in the Bible does likewise say:
"I have not come to bring peace, but a sword."
Which like, you don't need to twist that very hard to get to a place where you're going around "bringing the sword" to people who you think need it...
The Old Testament is big on genocide though, "We should definitely murder these children" has a lot more justification at the start of the book, or if you're batshit and think that stuff about Revelation, right at the end is a concrete prediction of future events then maybe that too.
That might be the noble aspiration that lives only inside their head, while outwardly the sentiment seems to look more like "make the government harmful so we can justify making it smaller."
Which would be laudable if that was what is actually happening. In practice it looks more like DOGE: setting every part of the government you don't understand or emotionally dislike on fire. Meanwhile, large corporate sponsors are allowed to do immeasurable harm without any oversight whatsoever.
Last I checked, corporations can't even exist without government blessing them into existence. If you have a problem with corporations, maybe you should dig into the root of that matter.
How does your second sentence follow from the first?
The root of the matter is the malicious harms committed against society by a given person or company or corporation.
The fact that people and companies and corporations are, in a general sense, "allowed" to exist by the government, seems vaguely tangential to the matter.
One side is clearly interested in helping others simply because they need help. The other is clearly interested in help others that they can relate to (look like themselves) and have earned the right to help (such as believing in the right god.) or only helping people that can help them back.