If we all took a turn on medic8r's couch and talked about politics for an hour my guess is that even the most "extreme" among us would end up agreeing on most of the issues.
IMO the "right wing vs left wing" divide is always trivialized in the terms of the last issue in the news, so even the most like-thinking people find themselves scattered all over the political map based on specific issues and our willingness to accept specific flaws in the current crop of candidates.
The only real continuum I see might be described as "realist" (right wing) vs "idealist" (left wing) if you want to say it nicely, or "cynical vs utopian" among friends, based on your degree of belief in the "universal goodness of humanity".
I think everyone agrees that we should help those in need, but not go so far as to encourage dependence or abuse. The hard part is that into practice and scaling concepts that work in small groups up to massive size. Our society has a sufficiently wide range of people that any "one size fits all" policy is either going to under-support the people who do really need help or over-support the people who aren't motivated to help themselves.
EDIT - of course the last sentence clearly positions me over on the realist/cynic end of the political spectrum
It shouldn't be possible to do "both" (under-support people in need *and* build a culture of dependency), but it seems that with a sufficiently large bureaucracy and an unlimited supply of taxpayer money many of our governments manage to do it anyways.
Even worse, our countries are big enough that the definition of "enough support" changes with the climate and is not consistent across the country. The first time I vacationed somewhere warm I was shocked to realize that with a bit of land you really *could* live a grasshopper life - hang out in front of your shack, pick fruit from the trees, do a bit of fishing, keep a couple of goats & chickens, and get by doing odd jobs for beer money. In the northern US and much of Canada the grasshoppers tend to freeze to death without government support and you end up with proportionally more ants... so it becomes almost impossible to agree on political direction across the country at the best of times.
In Canada one problem is that we just have too much government. I pay taxes to municipal, county, regional, provincial and federal governments, all pulling in different directions, and that seems like at least 2 layers too many. IMO for a country like Canada all we really need are regional and federal governments, where a region might be a large city plus the surrounding area (bedroom communities, water supply etc..) or a larger area outside the major cities.
The US has roughly the same number of layers but 10x the population, so maybe only 1 layer too many there, but "government for the sake of government" is still a problem and is generally considered the downside of a left-ish (ie Democrat / Liberal) government. The opposite of that should be "just enough government" or even "too little government", but we get the stereotype Republican / Conservative "government for the sake of our business buddies" instead, and it's hard to say which is worse.
One obvious problem is that upper level government jobs are just too damn cushy, so they tend to attract the wrong kind of people and discourage them from leaving, but saying things like that could start the kind of argument that we all swore to never get involved with again so maybe I'll stop here
