The Origin of MAGA Politics

It is an intriguing notion that politics has more to do with human evolution than ideology or economics. This is the contention of Nicholas Wade who has written several books about how evolution over millions of years has shaped the structure and functionHaz of human society, In The Faith Instinct he showed how religion back in prehistory bonded groups of people more closely together giving them an edge in surviving the challenges of a tough environment in competition with other tribes of people. In A Troublesome Inheritance he described how evolution created the different races and ethnicities across the globe and how these evolutionary impacts affect different cultures around the world. In his most recent book, The Origin of Politics, he describes how human social behavior has been influenced by evolution and how these behaviors affect our modern politics.

Of course, evolution has affected how human beings have developed but this evolution has not been uniform and human beings in different parts of the world evolved differently. This is clearly evident in the dark skin of sub-Sharan Africans and other peoples living around the equator. Dark skin was caused by melanin which provided essential protection from the equatorial sun. Nordic people and others living in the far north have lighter skin that lack melanin in order to absorb vitamin D from the weaker northern sun. Mr. Wade asserts that not only physical characteristics have been affected by evolution but also social characteristics. Chimpanzees and bonobos are very similar physically and genetically but have very different social structures – chimpanzees are patriarchal and bonobos are matriarchal. It is quite possible that distinct groups of humans would evolve differently and that this evolution also affected social structures (i.e., politics).

Early human hunter/gatherer groups were probably similar to the troops of chimpanzees but several evolutionary differences put them on a different path. While chimpanzees are hierarchical dominated by an alpha male who gets the lion’s share of matings, human hunter/gatherers developed pair-bonded family groups. This was necessary because the big brains of human babies meant that they were born earlier and less developed than the babies of chimps or most other mammal species. A baby deer can walk within hours of its birth but a human baby might take a year to accomplish that simple task. So human babies require extra care and having a father to support the mother in this requirement was an evolutionary necessity. So early humans developed into family groups unlike chimpanzee groups where most – but not all- of the babies were those of the alpha male.

Alpha males were a danger to these early human family groups. Richard Wrangham theorizes that the other pair-bonded human males banded together to eliminate the danger of alpha males in his book, The Goodness Paradox. He asserts that family kinship of pair-bonded couples eventually transformed our ancestors into a domesticated version of our more wild primate ancestors. This domestication can occur relatively quickly as shown by the experiments of Dmitri Belyaev in domesticating silver foxes. These animals were almost completely domesticated after ten generations and the domestication was heritable by future generations of foxes. This is likely how wolves evolved into dogs and ancient primates evolved into homo sapiens.

Mr. Wade writes in his most recent book, that these evolutionary factors should be incorporated into the political organization of our modern society. I think Prof. Thomas Sowell would agree. He wrote in his book, A Conflict of Visions, that political discourse is dominated by two visions, an unconstrained vision and a constrained vision. In the unconstrained vision human beings are a tabula rasa or blank slate at birth and that our culture, morals and political beliefs are social constructs, usually imposed the elites of society. This is the vision of the progressive left that is based on Marxist-based Critical Theory (and its variations) that divides the world between oppressors and the oppressed.

The constrained vision, according to Dr. Sowell, accepts the inherently flawed nature of human beings that makes the idealistic societies of the unconstrained vision impossible to achieve. Mr. Wade believes that this inherent nature of human beings is the one imposed on us by hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years of evolutionary development. Mr. Wade believes that evolutionary imperatives of kinship, ethnicity, language and religion have led humans from hunter/gatherers wandering in the wilderness, to tribalism, to authoritarian agricultural states and ultimately to the modern nation states of the 20th and 21^st century.

But there is a disturbing undercurrent to Mr. Wade’s most recent book. I enjoy science when it sticks to not only research but also skepticism. Nothing is certain in science. Every conclusion is subject to new information, new research, new data. Mr. Wade’s book began to take strident positions against progressive left ideas such DEI and egalitarianism that were more ideological than scientific. These ideological positions are similar to those of the left justifying transgenderism by saying the science is settled (in other words it can’t be criticized). Science – real science – is never settled. And using science to justify ideology while rejecting the skepticism of the scientific method cannot be justified. After hundreds of thousands of years as egalitarian hunter/gatherers human beings must have many genes scattered about our genome that favor egalitarianism. Even after forty thousand years or so I still have remnants of Neanderthal genes in my genome. So it is reasonable to assume that human beings are hybrids that combine many different types of genes affecting social structures, including some that favor egalitarianism as well as individualism.

Jonathan Haidt describes this dual nature of humans in his book, The Righteous Mind, where he describes the different moral axes of liberals and conservatives. He notes that people have moral intuitions which they have difficulty explaining. Perhaps these intuitions have been developed over tens of thousands of years and have become ingrained in our genetic structure.

Mr. Wade asserts that the modern nation state is the best form of social structure that conforms to how evolution has shaped our genome. He states that the social cohesion of a nation state is based on a common ethnicity, common language, common religion and most importantly a common narrative or history. He rejects the Lockean Enlightenment that he links to the globalism of the American-led Washington Consensus and says that “Locke’s theory pays no attention to the emotional bonds that stir people’s allegiances.” Mr. Wade prefers the ideas of Yoram Hazony who he believes bases his theories on biology instead of “the ill-informed notions of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke.” He neglects to mention that Mr. Hazony is an outspoken advocate of national conservatism and organized the National Conservatism Conference that featured JD Vance and other MAGA speakers including Tucker Carlson and Viktor Orban.

It is true that Locke’s vision was (and is) aspirational. Locke’s Second Treatise on Government was Jefferson’s inspiration for the Declaration of Independence. And it is the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (based on Locke’s notion of the social contract) that make America truly America and not just some other nation state. It is those aspirations that stir my allegiances and the allegiances of many others as well

And while the left’s belief that people are born as a blank slate that the collectivist central committee can form as they please can only lead to oppression and misery, Mr. Wade’s idea that our genome condemns us to a historical narrative instead of a creedal aspiration is also clearly unscientific. Much of the ethnic and racial differences among people have arisen since the end of the last ice age. But the time and distance that kept the peoples of the world apart has evaporated thanks to science and technology so racial and ethnic differences may soon be a thing of the past. You can see it disappear as you shop at your local grocery store.

Belyaev’s foxes show that genetic changes can occur over relatively few generations. While Stephen Pinker downplays biological or genetic causes for the multigenerational reduction in violence in his book, Better Angels of Our Nature (a phrase he lifted from Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Speech), humans have indeed been changed since the Enlightenment by the Enlightenment. Civilizational development is not linear and it is clear that we are currently in a period of regression where the parameters of ethnicity, language, religion and a historical narrative seem to overwhelm the aspiration of an Exceptional America. But I still believe in the words of the Declaration of Independence. As the great historian, Gordon S. Wood, who died in a car crash just this week, famously said, “to be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.” I guess Messrs. Hazony and Wade forgot that part.