Strong disagree.

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.

[deleted]

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.

[deleted]

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.

The other side actively goes out of their way to be cruel and is proud about it. All the while trying to stigmatize decency and help.

> 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.

"Government shouldn't help people" is such a bizarrely popular take in the USA.

I think the actual sentiment is closer to "first, do no harm" (a.k.a. the precautionary principle) which is not nearly as bizarre!