The fact that I agree that disposition leads to ideology is well known, and you're right, I tend to get shouted down by the right. And perhaps that's a datum supporting the thesis: There's a lot of ambiguity and nuance in the theories, and the theories predict that conservatives don't handle ambiguity and uncertainty at all well. (Or maybe they're afraid that understanding conservatism will lead to a cure? ;-))

A bit of nuance I need to interject regards the proclivities of engineers. You paint with too broad a brush--engineering is a huge discipline spanning the spectrum from the literally concrete--mechanical and civil engineering--to the totally abstract: programming. In my experience there is a very high correlation along that spectrum with the political spectrum right to left. Engineers who work with atoms tend to be conservative, engineers who work with bits tend to be liberal.

The programmer kind of liberal is often the very traditional kind, with its focus on civil liberties and individual expression; programmers delight in being "characters". And take seriously political issues like encryption and privacy. In the '90s I was associated, at the fringe, with the "Cypherpunks", the group of cryptographers who'd banded together to fight the government's noxious and tyrannical "Clipper Chip" initiative. Clipper was blatant Big Brother: Every product built using encryption would be required to implement it using a government-designed microchip which had a backdoor the NSA could use to read anybody's private data. We won that one, even though Edward Snowden has revealed that the NSA never gave up, and latched on to 9/11 as manna from heaven. Oh lord were we justified! And today, once again, it's the codemonkey community that's most outraged and most motivated to fight back.

There's been some nonsense on the Net conflating the views of asshole uber-capitalist entrepreneurs with the views of "Silicon Valley", smearing all of us with the noxious views of asshats blogging about how all the poor people in San Francisco are spoiling their days. Waaaaah! That's not us. And for the record, San Francisco is not Silicon Valley.

I first noticed the prominence of predisposition years ago in connection with religion, but of course it's a small step indeed to seeing the same thing with politics. We start with what feels right; our moral compasses live in our guts, not our heads. You can't think your way to a system of morality. I find it amusing that those who proclaim loudest that they reached their ideology through careful thought and rational evaluation tend to gravitate to crackpot religionsideologies like "Objectivism" that loudly proclaim their own rationality while spouting unsupported nonsense. Funny how the most passionate supporters of the supposed Vulcan detachment of Ayn Rand saw the light during adolescence. Lord knows that's every human's most rational and reasoned phase of life.

I'm cautiously optimistic these days. One thing I've noticed about conservatives over the years is that they never, ever, anticipate the backlash. It's building as an inevitable reaction to the excesses of the right over the last few years; Congress's 8% approval rating can be pinned overwhelmingly on the Tea Party Caucus.

But if the mood of the nation can swing, even a little bit, between conservative and liberal, what does that mean for our thesis of predisposition? Well, first, disposition is a nuanced thing; it's a tendency, a vector pushing each person a certain direction. But we're social beings, most of us, and we're influenced by the mood of people around us. After 9/11 the country swung violently in a conservative direction, and I found it hard not to be infected by the anger and hatred of the times. It was only a displacement, not a tectonic shift; while I thought we were justified attacking Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, I also knew that the "Patriot" Act was bad news. And damn, was I right about that or was I right?

But that fever has broken for a lot of Americans, and we've moved on to new fevers. The growing awareness of inequality of economic opportunity is awakening moral outrage, and will nudge the country leftward...slightly. And we can thank Edward Snowden, daily, for blowing the whistle on Big Brother.

The times they are a'changing, a'gain.