The r-strategy entails avoiding competition, supporting promiscuity, supporting single parent rearing, supporting earlier age of sexualization of young, and diminished loyalty to in-group/group competitiveness. Even the sexual dimorphism reverses, with manly females who provision and protect their young alone, and feminine males, who avoid conflict and competition as they mate with many females.

The K-strategy entails being aggressive/competitive (to get resources), monogamy/mate-guarding (competing by monopolizing mates), high-investment two-parent rearing (fitter kids who win their competitions for resources and carry genes forward), later age at first intercourse, and high loyalty to in-group/group competitiveness. Although it never comes up I would assume those in a K-selective environment would adapt to care less about the losers in the competition for resources. Even the sexual dimorphism matches, with aggressive competitive males who provision/protect, and feminine females who avoid competition and nurture in the two parent family.

The only difference between ideology and classical r/K is that humans may have adapted over many cycles of resource availability and resource shortage to adapt their strategy psychologically based upon environmental perceptions, adding a further level of adaptability over their genetic foundation. I see Dennis Mangan’s speech on supernormal stimuli as a key ingredient there.

If this is so, the coming financial hardships will probably diminish our population’s desires to provide free cell phones, easy home mortgages, and adjust the credit scores of the poor, for fairness.

Also sports interest, conservatives seem much more motivated by sports than others.

you could say that this isn’t sustainable. i don’t think it is. but an economic system as idiotic as democratic centralism in a marxist-leninist mode persisted in russia for 70 years. so there’s inertia in these things.

i agree age matters.

I talk to people, and most of my friends are liberal, about this sort of thing. Certainly not as much as you, but I do. And I pretty much never run into blank slatism except as something that someone used to believe.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/02/1120666109.abstract

Preferences are fundamental building blocks in all models of economic and political behavior. We study a new sample of comprehensively genotyped subjects with data on economic and political preferences and educational attainment. We use dense single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data to estimate the proportion of variation in these traits explained by common SNPs and to conduct genome-wide association study (GWAS) and prediction analyses. The pattern of results is consistent with findings for other complex traits. First, the estimated fraction of phenotypic variation that could, in principle, be explained by dense SNP arrays is around one-half of the narrow heritability estimated using twin and family samples. The molecular-genetic–based heritability estimates, therefore, partially corroborate evidence of significant heritability from behavior genetic studies. Second, our analyses suggest that these traits have a polygenic architecture, with the heritable variation explained by many genes with small effects. Our results suggest that most published genetic association studies with economic and political traits are dramatically underpowered, which implies a high false discovery rate. These results convey a cautionary message for whether, how, and how soon molecular genetic data can contribute to, and potentially transform, research in social science. We propose some constructive responses to the inferential challenges posed by the small explanatory power of individual SNPs.

I am not aware of any epigenetic or traditional method that would explain this correlation. That’s all it seems to be, correlations….I don’t think the field is there yet, this article wont hold up

it’s not young. it’s been around for a while. just ignored.

More generally, I know I’ve also read that there are only two things which typically change the partisan affiliation of adults past the age of 30 or so. One of them is changing economic classes. The other is marrying someone with the opposite political stances. This suggests that partisan affiliation is mostly unconsciously held, and if you pick up social cues from your peer group, most people will slowly conform to the new norms.

Your personal story is funny however, because it reminds me of my own ideological awakening. I had always assumed that my parents were pretty typical liberal Democrats growing up, but as a teenager I became interested in further left politics. I openly identified as a revolutionary socialist (although I never joined any party group), and didn’t vote for anyone who wasn’t a third-party candidate for many years. Talking to my mother as an adult, I found out she also didn’t vote for any Democrats at all before Bill Clinton, barring McGovern. She never shared with me that she had radical left politics (aside from occasional comments that rich people were assholes and couldn’t be trusted) – I just independently developed an interest in them, and came to the same conclusions that she had.

though this is going to be the future:

http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.0020041