On cruelty, empathy, and the difference between the right and the left

There's an argument going round that the main difference is that people on the right are happy to be cruel, and people on the left are not. That's not really true. It's more that people on the right do not let cruelty get in the way of their policy goals, while the left wing instinct is an aversion to cruelty.

Take border control. On the fringes of the left people basically advocate for open borders. Even those closer to the centre (Biden, Starmer etc) basically don't see it as a problem they're willing to put serious resources into tackling. Why? Because it requires being very cruel. People who have travelled thousands of miles to reach your country, being turned away at the border. If these people put themselves in dangerous situations to try and get in - the left and centre will rescue them and bring them into the country, and think of themselves as "good". To a right winger that's insane. You've just provided an obvious pathway for anyone to enter the country - put themselves in a small dinghy in the English Channel, and the RNLI will come and rescue you. It's an incentive to endanger themselves, and if you take it to its logical extreme - if every person in Sudan would be able to claim asylum in England by showing up in a small boat, they will all come. The right would be willing to say "no, you're not getting in no matter what", and if that means some migrants die in the channel, it's their fault. Because it removes the incentive for them to come altogether.

Or we can look at deportations - the other side of immigration enforcement. Deportations are cruel. For individuals, it's bad. But if that individual has a family, kids that were born in the country etc. then it's really cruel. Are you really going to deport a father of 3, leaving his family without an income? The left would say no, that's completely insane. The right would disagree, they'd say that if you don't deport that man, you're creating a pathway for people to stay illegally - cross the border, then have a kid. They'd say that if you don't deport people, the incentive is for more and more to come. Or if you say you won't deport kids. It's abominably cruel for immigration enforcement to enter schools and arrest the children, vile. But at least in the UK, the dinghies are full of 25 year old men who say they're 15, because 15 year olds are more likely to be allowed to stay.

We could apply the same general arguments to things like criminal justice, welfare etc. The point is - what the left sees as a right wing love of cruelty is more of a right wing unwillingness to let empathy get in the way.