Thanks for sharing your perspective @jaroonn, I find it illuminating.
Since then, the Republican party was evolved from being the party of limited government, to an umbrella organization of various "conservative" "Christian" "right-wing" causes.
Is that not an inevitable thing that happens on both sides? In a two-party system it seems inevitable that each side comprises an alliance of voting blocs. The left seems just as much an amalgamation of strange bedfellows. Now you even have LGBTQ+ people standing shoulder to shoulder with people who believe homosexuality should carry the death penalty. 
I do agree that the GOP seems to have moved away from being the party of limited government, but I don't think that's because it has fractured into various right-wing subgroups. In fact, from what I've heard, the people in these subgroups almost unanimously want limited government. I think the problem here is that any organization that exists wants to keep existing (because the people in it don't want to lose their jobs). So the GOP doesn't want to shrink down even though that's what almost all republican voters want.
But leaving aside the motivations of party politicians (who look after their own interests) and the parties themselves (which change over the decades or centuries), there does seem to be some kind of ideological distinction. I've often wondered about this question: what fundamentally distinguishes the left from the right?
So far the two things I have found that appear to be constant across time and cultures are:
- The right looks towards individual freedom and personal agency to solve problems, whereas the left looks towards authority to impose solutions.
- The right favors cold hard truths, whereas the left seems more concerned with optics and embellishment.
Is that latter point something you don't observe at all? I mean... Even the name itself, the "democrats", as if they are somehow more democratic than the opposition. Rather ironic when much of their agenda is explicitly anti-democratic (representing the interests of minorities rather than the interests of the democratic majority, and often at the expense thereof). But it works...
A few months ago a friend confessed to me that the older he got, the more right-leaning he became. He said that in the past he had always considered himself left-wing, because in his mind the left were the good guys and the right were the evil ones.
I asked him why he thought that, even though I already knew the answer, because I had recently asked myself that exact same question.
"Because that's what I was always told."
To me it seems clear that a lot of the support the left gets is not based on whether their arguments are sound, but rather on their public image being presented as "this is who you vote for if you're a good person".
What's chilling is that they demand to bypass all checks and balances. No court orders, no requests for data, no transparency, no jurisdiction, just unlimited access for state bureaucrats to dig through the private data of anyone anywhere in the world.
