I don't know about "hate", but one of the foundational ideas of the US, at least from what I can make of it, is that more control should be relegated to the low

I don't know about "hate", but one of the foundational ideas of the US, at least from what I can make of it, is that more control should be relegated to the lower levels of government (to the states or the people), and the highest levels (the federal government) should necessarily be sort of the least common denominator of what everyone agrees on -- which, of course, is going to be few things. So you have a situation where one side wants to "help people" by throwing money at them and yelling at the other side for being heartless greedy bastards, and the other side wants to "help people" by imposing state-sanctioned morality on them and yelling at the other side for being immoral hedonists, and the federal government being simultaneous trying to be used by everyone for their own purposes and yelled at by everyone for being "obstructionist" (hint: that's it working as intended).