What is the fundamental difference between those on the Right and those on the Left? It’s not a matter of differing economic policies, nor of conflicting social policies. Differing policies are merely symptoms of the fundamental difference between Right and Left. What actually differentiates those on the Right from those on the Left is the allocation of empathy. While the term “empathy” is fairly broad, it’s generally understood to be the capacity to understand and relate to another person and thus value and take into consideration the other person’s feelings, needs, and well-being. On the Right, empathy is ordered, with greater empathy being afforded to those closest and waning in gravity as the subject becomes more and more distant. On the Left, that order is inverted. And in recent years, it's even been weaponized.

In a 2019 study published in Nature Communications, researchers Adam Waytz, Ravi Iyer, Liane Young, Jonathan Haidt, and Jesse Graham studying this fundamental difference between Right and Left, concluding that those on the Left “express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism),” while those on the Right “express compassion toward more well-defined and less encompassing entities (i.e., parochialism).” The sprawling study examined roughly 20,000 subjects over the course of seven experiments. One experiment discovered that those on the far-Left rank “love of all others” as a higher priority than “love of friends” and as a significantly higher priority than “love of family,” while those who identified as either “conservative” or “very conservative” ranked “love of family” and “love of friends” nearly evenly, with “love of all others” ranked much lower.

Similarly, another experiment found that those on the Left identify most with “all humanity,” with “identification with community” being given a much lower score and “identification with country” the lowest score of all. Once again, the matter was practically the inverse for those on the Right: “identification with country” was scored the highest, followed closely by “identification with community,” while those on the Right scored “identification with all humanity” even lower than those on the Left scored “identification with country.”

The experiments’ results “demonstrate that conservatives are more parochial than liberals — their moral circles are more constrained. This political difference manifests at the level of family versus friends and the nation versus the world,” the study’s authors wrote. “If ideological differences in compassion simply reflect policy issue differences, then they should affect attitudes toward targets relevant to these social issues. However, if these ideological differences permeate more deeply into liberals’ and conservatives’ general worldviews, they should manifest in evaluations of targets completely devoid of social and political relevance.”

Another set of experiments tested the “moral concern” that those on the Left and those on the Right evinced towards human and non-human subjects. Astoundingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, the test found that those on the Left place nearly the same degree of “moral concern” on non-human subjects as on human subjects, with those furthest on the Left placing the same degree of “moral concern” on non-human subjects as on human subjects. Interestingly, the study found that those on the far-Left actually evinced a lower degree of “moral concern” for human subjects than any other ideological demographic. Once again, those on the Right demonstrated the opposite tendency, evincing a high degree of “moral concern” for human subjects and a much lower degree of “moral concern” for non-human subjects.

Perhaps most interestingly, one experiment provided participants with the ability to rank and allocate both actual and ideal “moral concern” on a map, ranking specifically: (1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence.

Those on the Right allocated “moral concern” exclusively to humans, with those closest (friends and family) receiving the highest scores. The “moral concern” evinced by those on the Right began tapering off after friends, waning as it passed through acquaintances, all people you have ever met, and all people in your country, dropping off steeply when it came to all people on your continent and all people on all continents, and going cold as the map approached non-human subjects. For those on the Left, the pattern was almost completely the inverse: all living things in the universe, including plants and trees, all animals in the universe, and all natural things in the universe, including inert entities such as rocks, scored the highest degree of “moral concern,” while family, friends, and countrymen scored less than half that.

“One caveat to [the experiment] is that we constrained the number of units that participants could assign to each group, forcing participants to distribute moral concern in a zero-sum fashion (i.e., the more concern they allocate to one circle, the less they can allocate to another circle),” the study’s authors noted, adding that “research suggests that people indeed do distribute empathy and moral concern in a zero-sum fashion…” The authors continued, “The present research also leaves several open questions for future examination. Given that we elicited responses from participants rather than examining their spontaneous tendencies toward parochialism or universalism, additional research can assess whether these patterns of moral concern appear even when unprompted.”

Those patterns of moral concern, it happens, do appear even when unprompted. For evidence, look no further than embattled Minnesota. Last month, federal immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis took a deadly turn when 37-year-old left-wing activist Renee Good was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent after she interfered with and obstructed law enforcement operations and struck the agent with her car.

Review the facts: First, ICE operations in Minneapolis were targeting illegal immigrants, namely those that President Donald Trump and his allies have referred to as “criminal illegal aliens,” those who not only violated U.S. immigration law, but continued committing crimes harming others once illegally absconding into the country. The immigration sweep was prompted by rampant fraud committed by Somali immigrants, defrauding Minnesotans and American taxpayers of tens of billions of dollars. ICE arrested illegal immigrants charged with or convicted of kidnapping, armed robbery, drunk driving, child rape, “malicious punishment of a child,” and other crimes. These are the people who Renee Good sought to defend, actively obstructing lawful efforts to remove armed robbers, drunk drivers, and child rapists from the community. Second, according to multiple reports, Renee Good had just dropped her six-year-old son off at preschool before deciding to fatally clash with a federal law enforcement official. She was a mother of three.

As Waytz, Iyer, Young, Haidt, and Graham predicted in their study, the left-wing activist Renee Good allocated a greater degree of “moral concern” to foreigners, complete strangers accused of heinous crimes, than she did to her own family. Maybe she didn’t realize that’s what she was doing. Surely, no mother would think that the little six-year-old boy who she dropped off at school that morning would never see her again, would not ride home in her Honda at the end of the day, would never again be tucked into bed by his mother, would never again drift off to sleep as she sings him a lullaby. Interfering with law enforcement is no game, and Renee Good’s son will now grow up with a hole in his heart where his mother should be. Had she allocated more “moral concern” to her son and exercised a greater degree of caution and forethought, Renee Good might have driven off into the sunset that day, on her way to pick up her six-year-old.

What of those on the Right? Will Stancil is a good example. No, Stancil is not on the Right — he is, in fact, a left-wing activist, social media intellectual, and former Democratic candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives. Over the years, Stancil has become an object of bemused affection among online right-wing folks. While attending a protest/riot against ICE operations in Minneapolis this week, Stancil was punched by a member of the left-wing group Antifa. Immediately, the right-wing corners of social media lit up with concern.

One right-wing account responded, “It’s crazy that if Antifa were to seriously injure or kill Will Stancil, the left would forget he ever existed immediately, but a lot on the right would be sad because he’d no longer be around to amuse them with his antics.” Another posted, “I love how Will Stancil, by virtue of being a completely unrelenting leftist, has been adopted by the right as a sort of token that deserves to be protected at all costs.” Comments under the video of Stancil getting punched included right-wing profiles posting images of Vito Corleone from “The Godfather” weeping when his son is murdered or Michael Corleone howling in sorrow when his daughter dies at the eponymous trilogy’s conclusion.

Stancil may be a left-wing activist, but he is the right-winger’s fellow human and, indeed, countryman, replete with a “Leave It to Beaver”-style old-American-Midwest accent. In other words, he is not some distant stranger, but a fellow American that those on the Right have come to know and even, in a way, appreciate as a human. In fact, following Stancil’s encounter with Antifa, right-wing personalities have begun eagerly anticipating Stancil’s defection to the political Right. Contrast the online Right’s reaction to Stancil being punched — by his own political allies, no less — to the Left’s glee over the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September. Those on the Left celebrated, cheering on Kirk’s murder, mocking his death, and compiling lists of other right-wing figures to be slain.

This fundamental difference between the Left and the Right, this difference in the ordering of empathy, is the wellspring of all the policies the two sides advocate politically. For the Left, slaughtering unborn children in their own mothers’ wombs is no great evil, nor is the surgical mutilation of children’s genitals, but arresting and deporting foreign child rapists is their idea of Nazism. For the Right, American laws should benefit Americans and make it safer and more affordable to start, raise, and protect a family. The Right orders empathy according to emotional, moral, and sometimes even physical proximity, while the Left’s empathy is simply disordered.