The genes that pull our politcal strings.

In September 1960, if you were listening to the first presidential debate on the radio, you would have judged the vice president, Richard Nixon, to have won the debate. The debate was between himself and a young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Being that this debate took place during a technological boom in our history it was transmitted on the two major forms of communication. The aforementioned radio was quickly being replaced by the television as the source of information for the American public. It is of note that those who watched the debate judged JFK to be the winner of the debate against Richard Nixon. Those that analyzed the election of JFK would look back on this moment as the turning point of the campaign. An incumbent and popular Republican party engaged in a Cold-War with Russia favored a knowledgeable Vice President running for the highest office. In the end the televised debate doomed Nixon to failure by a hairs-breadth of votes. It is important to remember that there were two more debates that no one remembers. It was the first debate where Nixon was haggard, visibly tired, and unseemly that our genes spoke. The candidates’ appearance had been invisible to a listening audience. With the advent of technology which incorporated the visual, suddenly being presidential meant looking it.

Nixon didn’t contrast well against a youthful and handsome Kennedy. It did not matter what the two said, it mattered how they appeared. JFK was sexy while Nixon was not. In 2008 the youthful Senator Barrack Obama once again ran against an aged and established political figure. The votes have spoken and, much like the 1960 election, they have fallen towards the younger handsomer man. How much of this is our genes and how much is our intellect is an question that will not be settled anytime soon. The trend of appearance is also buttressed by within the 2008 election by the two Vice President hopefuls, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. Palin has gathered considerable heat for spending over $150,000 on a new wardrobe, and her counterpart Joe Bidden has been poked in comedy circles for installing hair-plugs. These issues are intellectually trivial, but do have roots in our biology.

Our genes inform our actions just as our subconscious does. The two may even be one and the same in some regards. They are both subliminal, and they are both equally studied by separate branches of research. In Rome, Cicero, Caesar, and Brutus all practiced rhetoric together in order to manipulate people for their support. In this regard they were all politicians, and they understood that gathering power was as easy as gathering the hearts and minds of the people. This famous trope runs through all aspects of our modern news analysis. Every politician understands that support for their position comes from the bottom rungs up. What has been recently considered is how much our hearts and minds follow our genes. Being that we are a socially inclined species it is only natural that our politics are dictated by our social inclination. Non-human primates such as chimps and gorillas have a social structure that is defined by strength and ability. In our society we judges who should be the leaders by their qualifications, which is no different. If we are to align our thoughts with those of Kanazawa and Miller, we can see that how we judge the “best” is a complex system of signals centered on mating. The difference of our signals for who is the ‘best’ to mate with exists only by level of complexity. Those behaviors that helped us survive and reproduce in our evolutionary environment lend themselves to our modern one, and those politicians that tap these gene-level cues generally turn out for the better.

In our psychological makeup, psychosocial stress is transmitted to us hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal response. Our body judges our state of being through this avenue. One of the most potent ways to engage this response is through fear. If a politician can induce a fearful response by swathing his opponent in a demons cloak, he will win. A sense of discomfort and anxiety was invoked during the 2004 election. This tactic was ubiquitous through all elections, and was employed by both sides of the political spectrum. Each candidate spoke on how they would keep you safe and defined safety by their own terms. This plays to our base level, not our higher thought processes. Our genes and the environment help us define what is ‘safe’. A system where atheistic liberal baby-killers are expanding government looms large like an Orwellian nightmare is surely the favorite Republican bug-bear. Whereas an irrationally hawkish, gun totting, earth killing, politically organized racist right haunts the visions of many liberals.

In many ways our sense of security was once again tapped in the 2008 election. John McCain unashamedly played to ignorance and knee-jerk reactions in order to paint his opponent as a radical of many trades. Yet a real issue reared its chimerical head. Fears of economic downturns became the center of media attention, and candidates scrambled for their own brand of blanket to keep us warm during the coming crisis. Perhaps the appeal to a ‘second great depression’ played nicely with Barrack Obamas pre-established liberal economic structure. This paired well with his rational mindset, his cool demeanor, and his measured responses as the recipe for our gut-level verdict to appoint him president elect. This was truly a panacea for what will actually ail the nation in the years to come. It is in this way that our genes informed our actions on November 4^th. Clearly a real danger is better than a hypothetical one.

This scenario has rarely been the case in our presidential history. We, as a nation, look for leaders only during times of crisis. This was true with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Woodrow Wilson and now Barrack Obama. The tradition since the time of Jackson has been to find someone that resonates with the people. We have attempted to place ourselves in the seat of American power. Examples of this are Geroge W. Bush, Harry S. Truman, and Bill Clinton. This is something like assertive mating. This point can be joined with a trend of increasingly progressive political moves since the Seneca Falls convention of 1848. Females, as pointed out in Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters have a different priority set than men. This event marks the first time women became organized in regards to American politics. If one is to look at the presidents of the United States over the 200 year history, we would find that a different level of social concern is introduced from 1848 on.

The rights of slaves were supported by many iconic women like Harriet Tubman. Woodrow Wilson, one of the most progressive presidents, was elected within the same year that women gained the right to vote. FDRs famous coalition was heavily supported by this demographic. From this point forward in our history a greater number of social programs have been installed into our national machinery. According to CNN, our most recent election saw women vote 56% for Obama. This is 3% above the national margin. If the logic of genes informing our actions is to speak for this pattern, it would fall in line with the lower fitness ceiling for women and a greater concern for social well being because of this fact. Social well being through communal action is a platform that Barrack Obama stood on in many of his public speeches. This act is even more interesting because a woman sat contra to Obama in this election. Surely this was a disappointment to the McCain campaign who tried to cull women and conservatives in one fell swoop. Clearly merit had no place within the consideration, and visage alone was not enough. Whether this speaks for the strength of certain genetic informants over the other or for our intellectualizing of the scenario will always be murky.

In the end, the JFK Nixon debate was not a result of our new media defining a new path to our lever pulling instincts. It was instead a new variable in a system that was already in play long before our ancestors became habitually bipedal. We have been selected for to group together, to choose our leaders by their apparent strength, to gravitate towards those that are more like ourselves, and to use fear as a gauge for danger. We have the ability to override our genes in many ways, but if you play the right chords, at the right times, and to the right crowd, you might get elected. The idea of politics has never been to appeal to the issues at hand; it has always been about constructing an image of an environment that will sway a voter in one direction or another. Rhetoric or internet, our mind is matter and our matter moves to the beat of the most archaic drum.