Derb – I don’t dispute any of that. However, I think the rough mapping may be even rougher than you suggest. Prickly individualists can be found in almost every ideological camp. For example, many of the founding editors of National Review were notoriously prickly individualistic chaps who started out as Communists.

I just find arguments about the hardwiring of political attitudes to always be the product of the agendas of those looking to prove such things. This goose-chase has a very old pedigree and it’s almost always debunked. Herbert McClosky and Thodore Adorno come immediately to mind.

The fact that they’re looking at genes now shouldn’t change this fact. After all, if the genetic correlations were real, they would have popped up earlier and simply have been ascribed to different biological/psychological causes. I’m not saying that hardwired stuff doesn’t play a role, but the political and cultural context must dwarf such things since we find personality types on all sides of the political spectrum. What accounts for this distribution is the fact that we intellectually or emotionally choose different things to assert our personality types toward. A liberal might find the encroachment on his liberty to ban smoking entirely acceptable but flip out when he’s told he can’t send his kid to a different public school. For others it might be the complete opposite. The contexts are just way too important.

For example, I can imagine there’s a gene or set of genes which encourages some people to take up arms against their perceived enemies. But for some people that would induce them to be rebels and others defenders of the regime. Consider, for example, the famous war which divided brother against brother — the Civil War. Something other than genetics informed the politics of those who fought for the North and those who fought for the South.