Of course there are good and bad people across the political spectrum (well, bad people, at least) but so much of our mainstream political discourse is like this. Should we put poor people in the chipper or not? [Serious Centrist Voice]: How about just some of the poor people?
For a long time there was this myth that people on the Left and Right (mainstream Ds and Rs anyway) mostly agreed about the ends we were just fighting about the means of getting there. Or, at most, the Ds were a bit more inclined to smooth of the rough edges, but basically "we" "all" wanted equality of opportunity! And prosperity! And justice! And ponies!
And we've had decades of the best possible political approach being conservative means to liberal ends, and they mostly haven't worked out very well, in part (but not just) because conservatives never really agreed on the liberal ends and do their best to sabotage, when they can, programs they offered up as distractions.
It's fair (if a bit more complicated than some people make it out to be) to say that the ACA is an example of this. It's fundamentally a conservative approach to providing "better" health care, even if there are some liberal sweeteners to make it better than that. Though an example of why this whole thing is hilarious is that one of the liberal sweeteners - the Medicaid expansion - also exists largely to meet the demands of conservative/mainstream budget politics which required finding ways to make the ACA cheaper. Even the liberal stuff is conservative, or at least there to meet the ridiculous demands of conservative politics.
But, really, the conservative political movement, if not all conservative voters, are quite happy to put all the poors into the chipper. "We" should stop pretending otherwise.
