I think that's broadly true: both sides want America to fail when the other side is in power in order to prove they're right.
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.
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.
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.
That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
If someone really wanted to stop illegal immigration, punishing the businesses that betray American workers by hiring cheap illegal labor.
That seems a bit more efficient than hunting people on the streets with technology that can also be used to hunt anyone for any reason.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.)
The false equivalence of doing the "both bad!" song and dance serves to so radically under-emphasize the absolute wanton, orders-of-magnitude-worse levels of corruption and evisceration of norms of one side by reducing it to "more bad than the other but they're both very bad." It allows the window to shift to normalize the sort of destruction of systems we're seeing by hand waving away how "the other guys aren't great, either!" It's borderline discourse malpractice at this point, and should be called out as such.
While the right is comfortable holding their nose when white supremacists hang around because it gets them a bigger coalition, the left will excommunicate someone for saying out loud that they think trans women are not exactly equivalent to biological women. This shrinking of the coalition is how we ended up enduring another Trump presidency.
Not to mention the complete fiasco that was the 2024 presidential race. We should have thrown out the entirety of DNC leadership several levels deep for letting that happen.
From an outside perspective the US does not have a political left. The policies proposed by the Democrats are roughly in line with the mainstream right-wing parties in the rest of the world. A mainstream left-wing party would look an awful lot like someone like Bernie Sanders - and we all know the Democrats would rather platform a wet paper towel and lose than see him gain any kind of power!