Cultureplaces

Our political attitudes may be written in our DNA Scientists and laypeople alike have historically attributed political beliefs to upbringing and surroundings, yet recent research shows that our political inclinations have a large genetic component. The largest recent study of political beliefs, published in 2014 in  Behavior Genetics , looked at a sample of more than 12,000 twin pairs from five countries, including the U.S. Some were identical and some fraternal; all were raised together. The study reveals that the development of political attitudes depends, on average, about 60 percent on the environment in which we grow up and live and 40 percent on our genes. “We inherit some part of how we process information, how we see the world and how we perceive threats—and these are expressed in a modern society as political attitudes,” explains Peter Hatemi, who is a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Sydney and lead author of the study. The genes involved in such comp...

In 2015, Mr. Markovits delivered a commencement speech at Yale Law School laying out the themes of his book. “To promote your eliteness — to secure your caste — you must ruthlessly manage your training and labor,” he said. Credit William K. Sacco/Yale University Daniel Markovits, got onstage and told the students, more or less, that their lives were ruined. “For your entire lives, you have studied, worked, practiced, trained and drilled,” he declared. And that rat race was far from over, at least if graduates wanted to maintain their, and their children’s, place in the “new aristocracy” of merit. “To promote your eliteness — to secure your caste — you must ruthlessly manage your training and labor,” he said. “To live this way,” he continued, “is, quite literally, to use oneself up.” The speech turned the audience at the most elite of elite law schools on its ear (even if it likely knocked few off their post-graduation paths). And now Mr. Markovits is...

By  Zack Beauchamp   @zackbeauchamp zack @vox.com     Jul 23, 2019, 8:30am EDT Wax promoted the idea of “cultural-distance nationalism,” or the belief that “we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the first world, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance.” She went on, “Let us be candid. Europe and the first world, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white, for now; and the third world, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural-distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.”