I find the only commonality is that after the right wing does something, both sides say “this is going to hurt so many people”. It’s just that one side is laughing when they say it.

I visit alt-right circles A LOT, and I have literally never once heard “the other side does these things out of spite”. The vast majority of the time, they don’t have anything to say on a topic beyond repeating some stupid meme.

Additionally, I would also like to point out that people on the right actually demonstrably DO have zero conviction for their beliefs. It is a tested fact that on the whole people on the right will absolutely flip flop on a topic the moment they find out that the left supports it (some 90% of right wing voters in tests), however, on the whole, people on the left are *far* less likely to flip flop (only some 10% of left wing voters flip on a topic upon learning the right supports it).

That the right actually votes out of spite is not just something people assert, it’s a tested fact.

Mitch *blocked his own goddamn bill upon finding out that dems supported it*.

You obviously haven't been in any right-wing circles.

They're constantly saying that the other side "hates you and wants to destroy the country", exactly the same thing left-wing circles are constantly saying about them. If they're laughing when they're saying it, it's either because you're failing to read the room and arguing with someone who's just sharing an edgy meme rather than actually talking politics (I see this very often on the fediverse), or they're doing it in a cynical "haha, we're so screwed" manner.

> The vast majority of the time, they don’t have anything to say on a topic beyond repeating some stupid meme.

You from earlier:

> It is not possible for me to base my legislative direction on “everyone that is not cis white is bad”.

Both sides are totally guilty of repeating stupid memes instead of engaging in intelligent discourse. You just don't recognize your stupid memes because they seem like factual statements since you've heard them so much from your circles.

You hear someone say something that you disagree with and you immediately interpret it using the memetic pigeon hole that you've adopted for that "kind of person" instead of actually listening to what they have to say. Get out more and actually listen (really listen!) to what conservatives have to say. Why do they repeat the memes that they do? What do those memes say about their inner life?

As a rule, conservatives are no less thoughtful and caring than you are, they just have a very different set of axioms governing their ethics. Until you understand those priors their words will sound as irrational and foolish to you as your words do to them.

The data suggests that "both sides" isn't really the case here.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17457289.2019.15...

"these results suggest that Trump was able to leverage populist anger for political advantage in ways that other candidates were not and that such anti-elitism played an important and underappreciated role in explaining the outcome of the [2016] presidential election."

*Edit - added year in brackets for clarification.

Not going to pay 50 bucks to read that article, but if the term "populist anger" is used there in its common meaning, it's not about "other side" at all. It's mainly about people feeling supposedly representative government has abandoned any pretense of representing the population and their interests, and that understandably makes some people feel bad about it. It's not about pissing off some imaginary opponent, it's about making the persons taking decisions hear what the population is concerned about. And yes, a lot of people supported Trump because they thought - and think (correctly or incorrectly) that Trump is more attentive to these concerns than the alternatives.

You're trying to say that policy and representation is the broad concern. The studies say otherwise. The whole of government is one part of the elite that conservative America wants to tear down.

Do you think "owning the liberals" is a completely made up thing? How do you think it compares to the phrase "owning the conservatives", a phrase nobody uses nor seemingly aspires to?

No, it's not the specific policy. It's the general feeling that there's no representation at all happening. And yes, people would certainly would want to tear down the elites that don't even bother to listen what their subjects want - it's exactly how it happened all over history, once the elites forget the population exists and has needs, the revolution is brewing in one form or another.

> Do you think "owning the liberals" is a completely made up thing

No, I don't think it's completely made up. I think it's by far not the main driver, and claiming like everything the right does, or even most significant driver for what the right does is this is nonsense.

> "owning the conservatives", a phrase nobody uses nor seemingly aspires to

A brief search (not using Google since their results are garbage now) provides ample proof otherwise. But my point is that spite in not a primary motivation neither for the right nor for the left. Since the right is by its nature more reactionary (I don't use it here as pejorative but as a description of action caused by another action), their actions can looks spiteful in more cases, but that's not the primary motivation, whatever the forum trolls say. For the trolls, on both sides, yes, this is a primary motivation, sure, and they obviously exist, but they are not the main or the only force by far.