Strange Determinants of Political Alignment
Building a happier America
Sometimes it’s nice to pretend that neither Donald Trump nor the Woke Moment ever existed, and that “Conservative” just means “likes somewhat smaller government” and “Liberal” just means “likes somewhat bigger government” and political decisions don’t have democracy-ending consequences. We’re gonna do that today.
Conservatives are happier than liberals.
I don’t really know why this is happening; all of my pet theories like “it’s social media” or “it’s the youths” or “it’s from reading the news” are either wrong or egregiously wrong. (See
’s post, which pours cold water on basically every conceivable confounder.)It seems like this effect is actually fundamental to the ideologies in question—being a conservative makes you happier; being a liberal makes you feel bad.
The implication is clear: to maximize social wellbeing, we should be researching new ways to maximize conservatism among American citizens.
It appears that “between 30-60% of the variance in social and political attitudes could be explained by genetic influences.”1 So clearly gene-editing and embryo selection is a promising pathway…
Unfortunately, researchers have so far been pretty unsuccessful in identifying exactly which genes are responsible. But a couple promising candidates are:2
Various dopamine receptors. A couple of studies investigate (respectively) the role of specific DRD2 and DRD4 alleles on partisanship and alignment. The first found that the presence of the A2 allele of the DRD2 receptor gene is associated with increased partisanship—though not in any particular ideological direction. The second, fascinatingly, found that the presence of the 7R allele of DRD4 makes “number of friends” into a reliable predictor of political alignment:
So, obviously, we should engineer lots of doubled-up DRD4-7R superbabies, and then socially isolate them from birth.
“NARG1, an N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor,” suggests one complicated-statistical-method-using paper. The authors estimate that NARG1, in consort with some other, lamer genes might account for 8-13% of ideological variance. Cool! I’m pretty tempted to believe them, given that NMDA maybe does a million other cool things, but it’s probably best not to get too excited about this.
Also, even though I’m pretty clueless about biology, I don’t think t the authors have any idea which (if any) NARG1 allele would lead to increased NMDA function. But they’re associated! So NMDA function is maybe, vaguely associated with ideology—and, based on the NMDA pathway’s general psychosocial profile (more NMDA = more case-by-case, prior-updating reasoning), we should expect increased NMDA function to make people slightly more liberal.
One of the best NMDA antagonists out there is ketamine—so, boom, we’ve discovered the biological mechanism of Elon Musk’s rightward turn! And we’ve also discovered the key to increased general happiness: ketamine in the water supply.3
I should note: a more comprehensive, more recent study thinks this sort of “searching for a single ideology gene” is all a waste of time:
Even if we could ensure the perfect measure, the plethora of relevant individual genes and their complex interactions with other genes, as well as the environment counsel against expecting that any individual genetic markers could explain a sizable amount of the genetic variance in political temperament and without a very large sample, identifying genes of small effects is unlikely. Our findings are consistent with this polygenic expectation.
So probably we should focus on doing more GWA studies and developing robust in-vitro polygenic partisanship screening methods.4
Blugh, enough science, am I right?
It’s terrible, so boring, no one wants to talk about it—you know what everyone’s excited to talk about all the time? The weather!5
And the weather seems to play some role in determining political alignment—specifically, the weather on the Fourth of July.
A 2011 paper from a top Italian business school and also kind of Harvard found that “one Fourth of July without rain before age 18 raises the likelihood of identifying as a Republican by 2 percent and voting for the Republican candidate by 4 percent.”
Of course, the question remains: how do we stop the rain? Cloud-seeding is a tried-and-true technique for causing a storm, but it’s not nearly as easy to keep a hard rain from falling—it’s simply a-gonna.
Or is it?
In 2002, a company called, very 2002-ly, Dyn-O-Mat, sent a B-57 Bomber filled with Dyn-O-Gel—their proprietary superabsorbent polymer, which could absorb 1500 times its weight in water—over a thunderstorm by the Floridian coast. It unloaded 9000 pounds of the stuff, and poof, the storm vanished.6
But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was unconvinced. Its bureaucrat that’d been dealing with Dyn-O-Mat, Dr. Hugh Willoughby, dropped them pretty quickly, and latter made some fairly jerky comments to the Sarasota Herald Tribune about Dyn-O-Gel:
They sent me a jar of the stuff, and I played around with it some. We threw the stuff into the spray from a hose and it made little slimy drops.
On a tropical-cyclone-FAQ section of the NOAA’s website, Willoughby writes that Dyn-O-Gel simply wasn’t absorbent enough to deal with a serious storm at a reasonable cost:
But thunderstorms aren’t quite as big as cyclones—and in the years since the Dyn-O-Mat experiment, polymer technology’s improved: state-of-the-art, super-absorbent polyglutamic acid can achieve a water absorption capacity 3500 times its own weight.
I don’t really know how to redo this math for the average rainstorm, but it seems at least vaguely possible to soak one up with lots of desiccatives. We should really be flying bombers filled with weird polymer gels over developing storm cells near population centers in early July, in the hopes that more kids will grow up to be patriots.
Obviously this post is well past the point of pretending that pseudoscience is off the table, so I’m willing to suggest we station some hail cannons along major parade routes as well.
As far as I can tell, these are, hands-down, the most promising avenues to promoting general American welfare. We should commit significant national resources toward designing polygenic partisanship screenings for embryo selection, and also toward the development of more-absorbent desiccatives and simpler atmospheric delivery mechanisms. Fund the NSF!
Hatemi, Peter K et al. “Genetic influences on political ideologies: twin analyses of 19 measures of political ideologies from five democracies and genome-wide findings from three populations.” Behavior genetics vol. 44,3 (2014): 282-94. doi:10.1007/s10519-014-9648-8
Research for this bit led me down a rabbit hole that was only barely on topic, but I found some cool stuff, so I’m putting it in the footnote:
Other possibly-politically-active genes include MAOA and 5HTT. The former regulates monoamine oxidase A production; the latter tells your body how to make serotonin-transporters. Non-coincidentally, the two best-ever kinds of depression drugs are called MAOIs—monoamine oxidase inhibitors—and SSRIs—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
A 2008 paper out of UC San Diego figured these would be good genes to study for their effects on voter turnout. They write: “the less transcriptionally efficient alleles of these genes have been associated with a variety of antisocial behaviors … we hypothesize that people with more transcriptionally efficient alleles of the MAOA and 5HTT genes are more likely to vote.”
And they’re right!—sort of:
See that little tag under the 5HTT bar? “Religious Attendees”—it turns out that while high-activity MAOA alleles boost turnout among all voters, high-activity 5HTT only works on churchgoers. So active-allele 5HTT superbabies could probably win elections for conservatives (only the majority-conservative churchgoing population will end up voting) but won’t actually increase the number of happy conservative people around.
What improves NMDA function, you ask? Estrogen! This, and only this, is why women are more liberal than men.
In case it’s not clear that 99% of what I’m saying in this post is totally unserious, I’d like to quickly clarify that this suggestion is especially unserious and I think it might be a very very bad infohazard-y kind of thing to do. Don’t do this!
I am fun at parties
And then someone will try and work on making shrimp conservative.