Ridiculous, that's the rumor, yet deficit of truth. Conservatism wants smaller government, while socialism wants bigger, large government. The right tends towards more people who want to live free of government intrusion. The left wants the government to control all aspects of their lives. Both have rich, wealthy people who donate large sums of money....and the politicians kiss the arse on both sides at all times. The wealthy on the right want lower taxes....the wealthy on the left want the closed door deals. Either way, the rich keep getting richer, while they throw crumbs to the middle class and use the poor and minorities for votes....it's all a big joke.
You must have missed the New Deal under FDR, Medicare under LBJ, Truman’s veto of right to work laws, and the ACA under Obama. All democrats. And you are forgetting or overlooking recent tax cuts by the GOP: the ones for corporations are permanent; the ones for people expire. Bottom line: it is pretty well established that democrats - however you interpret the real effect of donations on policy -
tend to support programs/policies that benefit the poor, while republicans
tend to support programs/policies that benefit the rich. This goes back decades. Both have or spout economic theories for justification: the GOP believes that economic growth will trickle down from the top; democrats believe that wealth will percolate up from the bottom. Ask yourself how the parties are likely to line up if and when someone introduces a raise in the minimum wage or a bill to provide Medicare for all.
But you are correct: the right wants people free from government intrusion. Look at about the first thing Reagan did when nominated. He traveled to Mississippi to talk about and praise states rights, not far from where three civil rights workers had been killed, an event he didn’t mention. And his administration slow walked civil rights enforcement. Less government intrusion. Trump’s first actions were more clear: he released for use a pesticide that had been withdrawn for study under Obama since it caused birth defects, thus presumably endangering farm workers. He also eliminated the requirement that a firm’s record of deaths and injuries on the job be
considered when granting government contracts. Less government intrusion. Both actions favored the better off. And I am willing to bet that if you presented these actions as examples peope who didn’t know the party affiliation of the decision-makers, it would be easy to guess. Again, despite actions favoring the rich donors you could lay at the feet of both parties, the tendencies of both are pretty obvious. As my late mom, who worked in dress factories instead of going to high school and had to take sewing home at night, put it, “I vote for democrats because they are for the working people.”
The bottom line here is that over time, all the developed nations of the world and even many poorer ones have tended to spilt the difference between Ayn Rand’s “virtue of selfishness” approach of the 1890s and more towards John Donnie’s “No Man is an Island” approach of the New Deal. A differently regulated free market from Sweden to the US is the result,
