Category: Keepers

Tom Ricks penned a mini-manifesto of sorts yesterday on why he finds himself moving to the left. He’s always thought of himself as a centrist, but now finds himself drifting further away from American conservatism and Republicanism. Money quote:

I am puzzled by this late-middle-age politicization. During the time I was a newspaper reporter, I didn’t participate in elections, because I didn’t want to vote for, or against, the people I covered. Mentally, I was a detached centrist. Today I remain oriented to the free market and in favor of a strong national defense, so I have hardly become a radical socialist.

But since leaving newspapers, I have again and again found myself shifting to the left in major areas such as foreign policy and domestic economic policy. I wonder whether others of my generation are similarly pausing, poking up their heads from their workplaces and wondering just what happened to this country over the last 15 years, and what do to about it.

Good question, Tom. Like Ricks, I don’t believe my general inclinations politically have changed that much over the years. I prefer smaller government in general; I too believe in a robust defense; I have few issues with the free market; I think marriage and family are critical social institutions; I’m still a believing Christian; I have deep qualms about abortion and abhor affirmative action; I’m a fiscal conservative; want radical tax reform, cuts in unfunded entitlements, and culturally, I’m a libertarian, with a traditionalist streak alongside radical tendencies (so, for example, I both love the Latin Mass and intend to go to Burning Man next month). I haven’t renounced my precocious devotion to Thatcher and Reagan, even as I have out-grown them, as the world has as well.

But I am now regarded as a leftist by much of the right and to some extent, they’re right. In today’s polarized political climate, I have few qualms in backing president Obama over almost anyone in the opposition, and am genuinely insulted these days when some people call me a Republican. Tom laid out several critical issues which have now placed him on the left rather than the right in today’s environment. They’re well worth reading through. Here are my critical reasons, as of now, for wanting the Republicans defeated in any forthcoming elections.

The defense of torture.  As disturbing as the deployment of torture by the Bush-Cheney administration was, the continuing refusal of anyone on the right to cop to it and make amends for it is a clear and present danger to our core decency. Calling it something else doesn’t cut it. Violating the sacred honor of the United States and a founding principle of Western civilization because of one man’s panic and extremism cannot be put aside. Today’s conservatism – in stark contrast to Reagan and Eisenhower and every civilized nation on earth – is now intertwined with barbarism. Until they revoke this and become fully accountable for it, I cannot in good conscience be a member of the “right.”

Political brinksmanship. The conduct of the GOP during the Obama administration has been a nihilist disgrace. In 2009, Obama inherited crises on every front: an economy in terrifying free-fall, a bankrupted Treasury, an even more morally bankrupt foreign policy, and two failed wars. He deserved some measure of cooperation in that hour of extreme national peril and need. He got none. From the get-go, they were clearly prepared to destroy the country if it also meant they could destroy him.

In fact, from that first stimulus vote on, Obama faced a unanimous and relentless nullification Congress. If he favored something, they opposed it. Despite Obama’s exemplary family life, public grace and composure, and willingness to compromise, they decided to cast him as a tyrant, a radical, a traitor and an incompetent. Their demonization of a decent, pragmatic man simply disgusts me to the core. And, sorry, if you do not smell any whiff of racism in all of this, you’re a better person than I am.

Ideological blindness. Any party that can respond to the fact of yawning economic inequality in the 21st Century by blaming the 99 percent for not working hard enough has put ideology before reality. Any party that even now thinks slashing taxes below their current historically low levels will cure our economic ills is utterly delusional. Any party that is unconcerned with the social dangers of an economic system that increasingly rewards only the very very rich cannot be trusted with government. There has to be a pragmatic element to any conservatism and an ability too adjust to new circumstances and new problems. There are some hopeful signs among reformocons, but the tenor of the discourse remains absurdly doctrinaire, treating Reagan as some kind of god and compromise as the ultimate evil. Over the last decade, the GOP has seemed like a church rather than a political party, with dogma rather than policies, and beset by heresy-hunts rather than genuine debate.

Race, gender, sexual orientation. Yes, it’s hard to support a political party that harbors deep discomfort with racial and sexual minorities and many women. I’m a debater but I’m also a human being. I’ve enjoyed the back-and-forth over the last two decades on marriage equality – but to say I haven’t been affected by some of the rank bigotry displayed in that whole enterprise would be untrue. Listening to Republicans on race has also made me feel sick. The anger, the loathing, the condescension and the frustration are not things I want to associate with in any way, even though, for example, I’m sympathetic to many right-of-center positions – such as opposition to hate crimes or affirmative action. And the way in which women’s lives and sexuality are treated by the current right – the tone as much as the substance – repels me.

Anti-Intellectualism. I came of age when the right was bristling with new ideas and the left was pretty much exhausted. More important, the quality and civility of the conservative intellectual discourse encouraged eggheads like me to believe in a conservative future that was intelligent, reasoned and nimble. But it’s a long, long way from the heady days of Policy Review to the fulminations of the Daily Caller, a steep slope from Allan Bloom to Mark Levin, and a free-fall from the John McCain of the 1990s to the nomination of Sarah Palin as vice-presidential timber. Skepticism of a kind of liberal intellectual rationalism is one thing; scorn for the entire intellectual and academic exercise is quite another.

This is a rough and ready and short list. Longtime readers may be familiar with much more. The party of Lincoln, of Eisenhower and of Reagan still appeals. Which is why the party of Cheney, of Hannity and of Adelson so appalls.

I’ve tried to avoid the Clinton book tour bullshit this past month or so. Not good for my blood pressure. When I checked in occasionally, it was to discover that nothing much has changed. The Clintons are still self-pitying money-grubbers – $12 million in speaking fees since she left the State Department? – and now their offspring, exploiting her nepotistic advantage with all the scrupulous ethics of her parents, is continuing the grift. If you ask of Clinton what she’s fighting for, what she believes in, if you want to get her to disagree with you on something, good luck. Any actual politics right now would tarnish the inevitability of a resume-led coronation. That the resume has little of any substance in her four years as secretary of state does not concern her. She was making “hard choices”, and if we cannot appreciate that, tant pis.

I’d like to find a reason to believe she’s a political force who stands for something in an era when there is a real appetite for serious change. She could, after all, decide to campaign vociferously in favor of the ACA this summer and fall (universal healthcare is, after all, one of her positions), but that might siphon money away from her foundation and candidacy. She could get out there and start framing a foreign policy vision. But, again, too risky. I see nothing that suggests a real passion for getting on with the fight – just the usual presumptions of a super-elite, super-rich and super-cocooned politician of the gilded age.

So I did watch the Daily Show interview last week,  and was not surprised. As in most of her softball media appearances, she was both unctuous and vapid. But even I was aghast at the sheer emptiness and datedness of her one attempt to articulate a future for American foreign policy. She actually said that our main problem is that we haven’t been celebrating America enough, that we “have not been telling our story very well” and that if we just “get back to telling” that story about how America stands for freedom and opportunity, we can rebuild our diminished international stature. One obvious retort: wasn’t she, as secretary of state, you know, responsible for telling that tale – so isn’t she actually criticizing herself?

Next up: could she say something more vacuous and anodyne? Or something more out of tune with a post-Iraq, post-torture, post- Afghanistan world? Peter Beinart had the same reaction: “As a vision for America’s relations with the world,” he wrote, “this isn’t just unconvincing. It’s downright disturbing”:

It’s true that young people overseas don’t remember the Cold War. But even if they did, they still wouldn’t be inspired by America’s “great story about [promoting] human freedom, human rights, human opportunity.” That’s because in the developing world—where most of humanity lives—barely anyone believes that American foreign policy during the Cold War actually promoted those things. What they mostly remember is that in anticommunism’s name, from Pakistan to Guatemala to Iran to Congo, America funded dictators and fueled civil wars.

Larison piles on:

Changing the substance of policies is never seriously considered, because there is little or no recognition that these policies need correction or reversal. This takes for granted that opposition to U.S. policies is mostly the product of misunderstanding or miscommunication rather than an expression of genuinely divergent interests and grievances. I don’t know that Clinton is naive or oblivious enough to believe this (I doubt it), but it’s instructive that she thinks this is a good argument to make publicly. She is more or less saying that there is nothing wrong with U.S. foreign policy that can’t be fixed by better marketing and salesmanship, and that’s just profoundly wrong. It’s also what we should expect from someone as conventionally hawkish and “centrist” on foreign policy as Clinton is.

My fear is that she doesn’t actually mean any of this. She just needed to say something, and so came out with a stream of consciousness that is completely platitudinous and immune to Fox News attacks. It’s a defensive crouch that is always her first instinct. Think of the Terry Gross interview – and her discomfort in grappling with actual disagreement, from her own base that time. Her goal is always safety. And safety won’t cut it in a populist age.

So if she runs, my guess is she’ll wrap herself tightly in the maximalist concept of American exceptionalism and make this her appeal as a post-Obama presidency. See? she’ll say to the same voting groups she went for last time. I’m a real American, and I believe in America. And yay America!

Maybe this is merely a function that she isn’t running yet (and still may not). Why stir the pot if your goal at this point is merely selling books and raking in more corporate, Goldman Sacks dough? But when, I wonder, has she been otherwise? She remains scarred by the 1990s, understandably so. But the country has moved on in a way she seems to find hard to comprehend.

(Photo: Hillary Rodham Clinton, former United States Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and First Lady of the United States, speaks during the presentation of the German translation of her book ‘Hard Choices’ (‘Entscheidungen’ in German) at the Staatsoper in the Schiller Theater on July 6, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. By Adam Berry/Getty Images.)

[Re-posted from earlier today]

I don’t care for the “right side of history” argument with respect to gay rights for a few reasons. It’s horribly condescending to people who have a sincere view against gay equality; it presupposes some sort of inevitability where there isn’t any; and it fails to understand the nature of history. History is never as dull as the concept of “progress” would have you believe. It is always, as Oscar Wilde once put it, crowded with incident.

In no case is this truer than for gay America. Our story, if presented as a Hollywood screenplay, would be dismissed as too outlandish, too melodramatic and implausible, to be taken seriously. And yet it happened, and remains with us – so close it is hard to see it, and with several sharp twists and turns.

From the extraordinary repression of the 1950s – the McCarthyite era when all gay people were threats to the republic – to the liberation of the 1960s and the frenzied libertinism of the 1970s, you had one powerful narrative. After centuries – no, millennia – of brutal sanctions against the love of one man for another, an unprecedented, ebullient flowering took place. In small enclaves, an openly gay culture began to thrive and express itself with all the understandable abandon of the suddenly free. It was still very much a subcurrent, among so many other social shifts in that era, and was surrounded by hostility and discrimination and stigma. But the sense of outsiderdom partly intensified the joy and the solidarity. The gay ghettoes of the 1970s and early 1980s did not much care about the world beyond them for a while. Freedom – even in one, small place – was exhilarating enough.

And then the plague. It is, quite simply, impossible to conceive of a more dramatic reversal. If gay men had finally struggled free from the internalized notion that they were sick, or enemies of God, or all but asking for divine retribution for their sins, that paradigm closed in with terrible, ironic ferocity. What else could explain a plague of that brutality and specificity but the wages of Satanic perversion? Jerry Falwell could not have dreamed of a more perfect scenario. Pat Buchanan, with his usual flair, intoned that the gays had declared war on nature and nature had therefore declared war on them. And in some dark way, many of us were tempted to believe it.

It would be absolutely understandable if gay men had simply collapsed under the weight of this paradigm. Some quietly did, their deaths hastened by shame and self-loathing and anger. “Tell my mother I hate her,” was one of my dying friend’s last wishes, as he languished alone in his hospital bed. My closest friend at the time both showed extraordinary courage in the face of his physical disintegration and yet also painted on his naked back the words “Diseased Faggot.” The horror of the disease was compounded a million times by stigma. But the plague was also simply terrifying and terrorizing. No one knew what medieval bacteria would suddenly destroy his brain or liver or digestive system. No one knew who would be next.

I remember the intensified Provincetown summers of the early 1990s, where I had come to learn how to die. Each year, the band of infected brothers would come together and talk medications, buyers’ clubs, and drug trials, and care for the sick and mourn the dying and go to countless memorial services for the steadily mounting dead. (I suspect I will never go to as many memorial services in my seventies, if I last that long, as I did in my early thirties.) Some of us were intermittently crippled by the huge doses of experimental drugs we were then taking to keep the terror at bay. But we got past the nausea and the night sweats and the diarrhea to try and live before we died. We had a ramshackle night club in an abandoned house on Shank Painter Road, which we called the “Love Shack.” And every time you danced there with someone, you lost yourself in the eternal present, acutely aware that they might not come back next year, or you might not. It gave everything an intensity, a vividness, and an astonishingly fearful mindfulness.

Yes, medical progress was there, if tantalizingly distant for more than a decade. But in a perverse twist, as the medical gains fitfully continued, the deaths mounted. The worst year for deaths from AIDS was 1995 in a plague that had begun fifteen years before. And then, just as it seemed it couldn’t get worse, came the bewildering news of the breakthrough in treatments, the joy of those suddenly become Lazarus, and the deeper grief we had put off until the emergency was over. I sank into a deep depression that I subsequently came to understand as survivor guilt. Others – given a new lease on life but utterly bewildered about what to do with it – turned to drugs and sex and oblivion. Someone once observed that the members of ACT-UP after 1996 had three fates: they were either dead, crystal meth addicts or professional AIDS activists. What we had experienced during our most formative years simply made living hard, terribly hard, in the wake of survival.

Walter Armstrong has a wonderfully perceptive piece about this phenomenon that I recommend highly. The sexual oblivion of meth had its greatest appeal and took its greatest toll on the survivors:

Crystal methamphetamine took hold in urban gay communities in the late 1990s, soon after the first effective HIV drugs converted many death sentences and restored our generation to so-called normal life. Caring for the sick, burying friends and lovers, mourning the loss of entire sexual and social networks, and protesting in the streets had consumed much of our youth. Investment in the future, career building, saving money and all the other rigmarole of a middle-class US life had been jettisoned. The end of the crisis also meant an end to the intense sense of purpose and solidarity. Normal life could not compete.

As with other populations struggling with PTSD, a minority was collectively committing suicide, after surviving a war.

All of this was understandable, even predictable, given the powerful pressures crashing in on gay life. What was entirely not predictable is that the survivors also did something astonishing. Using the institutions and self-knowledge and smarts that had somehow defeated the plague, gay men charted a future when nothing like this would happen again, when gay men would never be parted from their spouses on their death beds, when gay men’s physical and psychological health would never be treated as insignificant, when gay men would never suffer the indignity that so many endured in front of our eyes. And so we built the case for marriage equality and for open military service as a recognition of the self-worth our survival had given some of us, and to pay some kind of tribute to those who had fallen.

We went, in other words, from about the deepest hole you can imagine to a determination not just to get out of it, but to see the mountaintop in our lifetimes. I do not know exactly where this act of will came from. It was not inevitable. It was, in fact, highly improbable. A few generations of licking of wounds would have been understandable. So would a collective in-turning in grief and pain and memory. But it didn’t happen. And today, we look out at that mountaintop … and may be forgiven for feeling vertigo.

Within the next few years, it is perfectly possible to conceive of an America in which marriage equality exists in every state and in which HIV is on a fast track to disappearance. If I had told my best friend before he died that this would happen in twenty years, his eyes would have widened into saucers. And we talk so much about how this has changed America, that we don’t often examine how it has impacted gay men themselves – how it is possible psychologically and emotionally to have come from such depths to such heights in so short a period of time, and stay sane and balanced and happy.

The younger gay generations know nothing of it, of course.

Because gay kids do not have gay parents, by and large, they have not been told stories of the dark days of courage and cowardice, and of unspeakable devastation and trauma. The average gay 22 year-old today simply assumes that marriage is his civil right, and has only passing interest in how it came about. As for the AIDS years, he is about as informed as the average straight guy. And this is not a bad thing as such. The whole goal of all this ordeal was to create a world with only the trace of a robust equality, and not of lingering and persistent pain.

And yet the trauma of plague still reverberates in our heads – and that includes the young as well as the old. Sex for most of us has always been synonymous with fear – and that fear has had remarkable resilience over the decades, even as the reasons for it have waned. In another new must-read, Tim Murphy shows how this overhang is still with us, even for those who never went through the trauma of the worst years:

Over coffee and pie at the Blue Stove in Williamsburg not long ago, Adam, 33, a writer and filmmaker I know, mentions that he is exactly the same age as the pandemic. “The terror was at its height when I was coming of age, postpuberty,” he says. “The message from TV shows that was drummed into us as gay boys was that we could get this disease and die and make our parents very sad. I developed this intense fear when I was having sex with someone and not even doing anything risky. I’d still freak out the next day.”

And, of course this did not just make all sex fraught with anxiety on both sides, it also divided us into two camps, the positive and the negative. For a while, I vowed never to date someone negative, and sought sex partners online via HIV-positive sites. And within the HIV world, I often left condoms behind, as impediments to the full sexual intimacy I craved and to the HIV solidarity rubber-free sex generated. And then I was famously dragged out in public and shamed for this by HIV-negative activists who opposed my politics. It was a sign that the negative-positive divide was still deep and occasionally vicious. It still is. On the hook-up and dating apps, you see the following phrases all the time: “Drug/Disease-Free For Same”; “Clean”; “Negative for Same”. Since no one has tangible instant proof of being HIV-negative, it’s not particularly effective in HIV prevention. But it instills the divide that has stalked gay men during the plague and after.

But that too is now collapsing. The revolution of the last couple of years is a Rubicon. We now know that any HIV-positive man on meds is no more infectious than someone who is HIV-negative. We also know that an HIV-negative man who is on Truvada cannot get infected. This means that there is no more HIV divide in the gay world – or rather that its empirical basis has just been completely erased. Which means, quite simply, that gay men for the first time since 1981 can live without fear of HIV if they so wish.

And this of course is just one more bewilderment. As we adjust to marriage equality and all that comes with it, we are suddenly offered the chance for an infinitely less anxious and less dangerous sex life as well. Men whose entire sexual identities have been wrapped, literally, in rubber, now have to navigate an entirely new world. Of course there is resistance:

Another HIV longtimer—a Chelsea store manager named Steve, 58, diagnosed in 1996—tells me frankly that, though he supports Truvada usage in theory, it mostly just pisses him off on a visceral level.

“I was at the Eagle a couple months ago,” he says, referring to the West Chelsea leather bar, “and this hot little muscly Latin guy told me that he was on PrEP and that I could fuck him raw. Boom, he just said it so easily.” Steve has lost many people he loved to AIDS. He finds even the effervescent celebrations of Gay Pride tough to witness. “I want people to understand why they’re able to take this right now,” he says. “It’s on the backs of people who have died and suffered. All that needs to be learned and honored.”

It does indeed. But I have no doubt that the beleaguered gay men of the early 1990s would be amazed and thrilled that we have come this far. They did not die hoping that their legacy would be sustaining fear in future generations for ever.

But bewilderment is not out of place. I think of the year I arrived here, and had to sign a box in my immigration form denying that I was a “communist”, “criminal” or a “homosexual”. In that year, 1984, the AIDS epidemic was just beginning to stalk the land, culling, by the time it was finally stymied, five times as many young men as died in the Vietnam War in roughly the same amount of time. I remember the exhilaration of coming out in the 1980s and the terror of watching men my own age die horrible, humiliating deaths in front of me. I remember finding out that I was HIV-positive and immediately knowing that, for that reason, I could be deported instantly, and living in America in that limbo for twenty more years, with no guarantee of success. I remember the deaths of my friends and lovers; and the shift in 1996 as long-term survival seemed possible for the first time. And I remember the countless speeches I would give to gay audiences about marriage equality, and the glassy-eyed, incredulous stares that came back at me. I remember my military friends, in constant fear and trepidation, fired at will, struggling to square their often conservative dispositions with a sexual identity that labeled them “queer.”

I remember … and I forget. I forget because in many ways, forgetting is the only way I can actually live with some measure of freedom from a past that will never let go of me and a future that still blinds with the abundance and clarity of its light. I am not alone. We are on this mountaintop together, even as so many dead lie round.

(Photos: The cover of One Magazine, June 1963; Dr. Richard DiGioia goes to George Washington Hospital to check on his patient, Tom Kane, on September 25, 1992. Kane is deaf. Dr. DiGioia hugs Kane before leaving. By James A. Parcell/The Washington Post via Getty Images; Thousands of people gather to view the AIDS Memorial Quilt on display on the Washington Monument grounds 10 October, 1992 in Washington, DC. By Renaud Giroux/AFP/Getty Images;  A couple participates in a symbolic group commitment ceremony for same-sex couples to kick off National Gay Pride Month at The Abbey bar and restaurant on June 4, 2008 in West Hollywood, California. By David McNew/Getty Images; Seth Keel, center, is consolded by his boyfriend Ian Chambers, left, and his mother Jill Hinton, during a concession speech during an Amendment One opposition party on Tuesday, May 8, 2012, at The Stockroom in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Amendment One, which would ban gay marriage in the state, was well ahead at the polls. By Travis Long/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT via Getty Images; Former US Army Lt. Dan Choi (L), a gay rights activist and opponent of “Don’t ask Don’t Tell”, arrives at the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse March 28, 2013 in Washington, DC. By Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images; Michael Knaapen and his husband John Becker react outside the US Supreme Court in Washington DC on June 26, 2013. By Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images.)

There’s a lot of truth to the old joke that liberals believe nothing is genetic except homosexuality and conservatives believe everything is genetic except homosexuality. On that spectrum, I remain broadly conservative (I think sexual orientation is almost certainly affected by some genes). I think a huge amount of what we fight over as cultural is much more linked to genes than we want to believe. And so I remain of the view that homo sapiens is not a separate and unique species of animal on planet earth, and has evolved and will continue to evolve in classic response to natural selection.

That’s why it has always struck me as pretty obvious that there will be genetic differences between various geographic sub-populations in particular regions where humans have evolved and interbred for millennia. This does not translate to our concepts of “race” which are often artificial and crude and unscientific; but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some overlap or that the core underlying argument – that human populations can differ genetically across the planet, just as every single other species on earth differs – is somehow empirically suspect. And that’s the fundamental insight I took away from Nicholas Wade’s flawed recent book on race and genetics: forget the conjecture that takes up more than half the book; forget the arguments about “race” and genetics; and just re-imagine ourselves as very advanced apes with a long evolutionary history on planet earth, with lots of minor, regional variations, like so many other species. It’s a mind-expanding thought experiment.

In some discrete respects, we accept this as unexceptional. So, for example, no one is up in arms about the discovery of a recent and powerful genetic factoid that we covered yesterday: 87 percent of Tibetans have a mutation in a gene called EPAS1, which enables better breathing at very high altitudes. Only 9 percent of Han Chinese have this mutation, and yet the two populations have only been separated for less than three millennia. As proof of principle, that’s hard to beat: dramatic genetic variation just for the last 3,000 years of the roughly 200,000 we’ve been evolving and wandering across the globe in so many starkly different environments with profoundly different genetic implications.

Our extreme intelligence in the animal kingdom means that our evolution has also been one in which culture and genes have intermingled in bewildering ways; and to miss culture as a core factor in our differences is to be just as blind to reality. But to see us as merely cultural beings, or walking blank slate brains, or completely interchangeable across the globe and all sub-populations is to miss the true drama of human history and pre-history. It robs the human story of its depth and richness in pursuit of an ideal – utter equality – that would have struck almost every human generation before three hundred years ago as bizarre.

Which is a very long-winded way (but hey, it’s good to get that off my chest) to say that it was refreshing to see Tom Edsall this week penning a bracing argument that genes may also lie beneath our political dispositions. In other words, a huge amount of what you’re born with may determine or at least strongly influence your liberalism or conservatism:

In “Obedience to Traditional Authority: A heritable factor underlying authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness,” published by the journal Personality and Individual Differences in 2013, three psychologists write that “authoritarianism, religiousness and conservatism,” which they call the “traditional moral values triad,” are “substantially influenced by genetic factors.” According to the authors — Steven Ludeke of Colgate, Thomas J. Bouchard of the University of Minnesota, and Wendy Johnson of the University of Edinburgh — all three traits are reflections of “a single, underlying tendency,” previously described in one word by Bouchard in a 2006 paper as “traditionalism.”

This somewhat acts as a confirmation of Jonathan Haidt’s notions of the values that predominate in conservatives and liberals. And here’s the data from sets of fraternal and biological twins:

The religiousness differential is particularly stark, followed sharply by authoritarianism. And Edsall is right to note this may help explain why, in a polity riven by core cultural questions, the ability to compromise, or even understand the other side, is in short supply. When it comes to economic questions, the divide is much less stark. There is, in other words, nothing the matter with Kansas. Kansans’ social and cultural value system outweighs in intensity and durability any economic arguments – and it’s our genes in part that facilitates that. Edsall’s conclusion?

Perhaps the most important rationale for research into the heritability of temperamental and personality traits as they apply to political decision making is that such research can enhance our understanding of the larger framework within which public discourse and debate shape key outcomes.

Why are we afraid of genetic research? To reject or demonize it, especially when exceptional advances in related fields are occurring at an accelerating rate, is to resort to a know-nothing defense. A clear majority of those involved in the study of genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology are acutely aware of the tarnished research that produced racist, sexist and xenophobic results in the past. But as the probability of a repetition of abuses like these diminishes, restrictions on intellectual freedom, even if they consist only of psychological barriers, will prove counterproductive. We need every tool available to increase our understanding of our systems of self-governance and of how we came to be the political animals that we are.

And we have nothing to be afraid of but the truth.