Exactly! Our culture is a patriarchal dominance-based hierarchy, where just as you described, someone has to lose in order for someone else to win and many people look at every single interaction they have in life through that lens - zero-sum. This is the root cause of most of our social ills, such as sexism, racism, and homophobia but also things like police brutality and garden variety bullying.

Republicans are more highly bought into this dominance hierarchy mindset, as you pointed out, but we are all steeped in it to some extent - although some embrace it more than others. It really is destructive and kind of stupid, if you think about it, but I don't see it going away any time soon.

"In a patriarchal dominance hierarchy, rankings and status are often artificial, based on immutable traits like gender, race, and sexuality, or in life situations that confer inherent disadvantages right from the start, such as being born into poverty. It’s also maintained through a kind of might makes right ethos that justifies and even approves of ruthlessness in order to rise in the pecking order.

In the face of that, racial, gender, sexual, or other kinds of equality can never be achieved, because that is so deeply incompatible with the framework that our society is built on — one of violent domination of others in order to achieve power and position. This is something that our nation knows well, and believes in at its core. Manifest Destiny, the 19th-century cultural belief that America had not only a right but a duty to settle, annex, and claim all the land in the West (no matter who else was already on it) was a reflection of this sort of mindset. Might Makes Right and the fittest, i.e., the most ruthless survive. (Interestingly, actual evolutionary fitness refers to who is the most adaptable in any given environment, not who is the tallest, strongest, or most cold-blooded.)"

https://medium.com/inside-of-elle-beau/nothing-will-ever-truly-change-343a125b6abe