I have noticed in the US more than anywhere else I've lived, the most important thing to everyone seems to be that no one gets anything unfairly. I've noticed more with Conservatives because of the noise they make about things like welfare freeriders, election fraud etc, but i imagine it applies to Liberals as well when talking about other issues.
People seem to genuinely prefer letting poor people starve over accidently giving a less-poor person free food. I find it extremely frustrating.
It’s a perennial wedge issue in American politics. These wedge issues ultimately benefit the two party system at the expense of the governed, as the underlying issues are never resolved, just papered over for a term or so.
It's a strange attitude, to be sure. In my experience, many Americans have the view of "if it's not perfect, it's not worth doing" when it comes to large-scale social or legal concepts. It's like they don't accept that there's going to be inefficiencies in any large organization.
And, yes, so many rail against something like single-payer healthcare because it would be "unfair" for them to pay for someone else's care, when they already are doing the exact same thing as part of private healthcare! Not to mention it would be cheaper, but paying $5,000 for single payer is seen as evil when people are paying $10,000 for private healthcare! (both figures are simply illustrative and not intended to be factual examples, before anyone rips my head off)
The private healthcare insurance industry is a private coverage holders’ Potemkin village prisoners’ dilemma, holding uninsured potential free riders hostage to prevent a sunk cost fallacy from becoming a self fulfilling prophesy of the insureds’ own design.
> I've noticed more with Conservatives because of the noise they make about things like welfare freeriders, election fraud etc, but i imagine it applies to Liberals as well when talking about other issues.
It's a big generalization to say that, because one side of an ideological divide behaves one way, the other side must, too! I think rather the Democrats (we don't really have a Liberal party) are a party that takes some tentative steps in the direction that it's better for everyone to have something, even if there are some people who don't deserve it; that is, that the malady you diagnose is a Republican, not an American, preoccupation.
Of course you can look back in history and find instances where Democrats have embraced such positions, too, and you can find plenty of odious things even in today's Democratic platform, but I think that today's Democratic party is consciously, if very slowly, trying to distance itself from exactly the mindset that you describe. But maybe I'm blinding myself to this behaviour in an attempt to justify my adherence to the lesser of two evils. Do you have examples?
I'm not saying that everyone must behave the same way, I'm saying that capital L Liberals here are not really that different from capital C Conservatives in any way except degree. Both would rank as lowercase c conservative compared to most of the rest of the West and both have this mindset that I have only really noticed in America.
I specifically am not using Republican and Democrat because the parties are not really important to the point. Libertarians and Greens also have this "imperfection is worse than nothing" mindset.
An example where Liberals needed to relax and not let perfect be the enemy of the good was the 2016 presidential election (and almost 2020 as well). The number of people who said things like, "I know Trump might win if I don't vote for Hillary, but too bad!" was so high that it actually happened.
People seem to genuinely prefer letting poor people starve over accidently giving a less-poor person free food. I find it extremely frustrating.