I really don't understand what motivates so many people to be petty and mean-spirited and why it is so much more prevalent on the left side of the aisle, as indicated quite well by this thread and others.
Both sides expect to get ignored at best (you get nothing while the crony-capitalists who invested on the Other Side get what they want) or stepped on. At worst our political process has degenerated to a new spoils system in which the winners use government to enrich themselves irrespective of the harm that such does. If one side has an interest in wars for profit and selling off the public sector for profit even if such brings ruin, then we will get ruin if and when that one side prevails.
Service without partisanship is the ideal of democracy. Use of the government to enrich the well-connected at the expense of all others -- that's how things work in pathological orders like Iran today.
The Left knows what the Right intends -- huge reductions in living standards for working people while employers can demand longer hours of toil under harsher conditions, a shift of taxes to workers for the benefit of profiteers, wars for profit, quick-buck ravaging of natural resources, environmental degradation, the promotion of superstition and pseudo-science in an effort to homogenize culture and create a People afraid to contradict the cruelty and dishonesty of their appointed leaders, the establishment of command0based politics, and (of course) the enrichment and pampering of elites.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/05/as-partisan-rancor-rises-states-that-back-a-loser-will-be-punished.htmlThe idea that the winners have no responsibility to the losers is the essence of vindictive government that invariably goes tyrannical. Maybe we on the Left have some arrogant attitudes toward superstition and pseudoscience because such things have neither improved humanity nor advanced economic or scientific progress. We don't endorse Pascal's wager that we can live miserably in this world on behalf of uncertain benefits in the Next.
The Right fantasizes a "Real America" as Sarah Palin portrayed -- one in which undereducated, Bible-believing, white rustics dominate the culture. That culture has no use for New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, or Boston.
