> Don't you think that is a very cynical view?
It's a realistic view.
> The party or parties you disagree with may not share your views, but they do have many things in common with you. In
The major party I disagree with least doesn’t share my most of views but has many things, in broad focus, in common with me.
That’s very much not true of the major party I disagree with most.
> In order to build bridges with other parties, it’s important to believe that the majority of people who get involved in government, regardless of party, are motivated primarily by the desire to serve their neighbors and their country
Why would “building bridges with other parties” be a goal? A lot of people seem to have gotten ideas that the long realignment period from 1930s to the 1990s when the salient political divides were not along the same axis as the divide between the major parties (though they were approaching alignment at the end of the period) was a norm and not an aberration, and thus have fetishized bipartisanship which was simply a result of ideological factions crossing partisan boundaries rather than generally being contained within major parties. When that applies, you don't need to build bridges between parties, the factions inherently provide it; when it doesn't, you don't have a commonality to build on.
And, in any case, this is the fallacy of argument to the consequences of belief – you are justifying a belief in a fact claim not by any evidence that it represents the actual facts, but by the notionally desirable consequences of believing it independent of its truth.
> Without that belief, it will be near impossible to form agreements across the aisle.
I actually think that its a lot easier to achieve agreements across the aisle, where there is utility in doings so, by observing the actual things that the specific goals the other side has in concrete terms and appealing to them, rather than fantasizing a distant abstraction like “serving the neighbors and their country”. The latter is only useful once you determine a concrete operationalization that comports with the actual behavior of the individuals involved, but that offers nothing between a low-level concrete model of interests that avoids any high-level abstractions.
Now, to the extent that its often a concrete low-level interest that they want to be seen as motivated by the desire to serve their neighbors and their country, that may be useful, but that’s different than believing that that is their actual motivation.