i have no idea what arthur c. brooks thinks he's doing in this piece, but the attempts to naturalize or biologize the left-right spectrum are just pitiful. some folks want to imprint it on your amygdala, while others go olfactory. folks have wound themselves into such partisan tizzies that they cannot think their way outside at all; they have lost even a rudimentary power of self-reflection. they are trying to say: everyone in the whole world, insofar as they are human, is trapped in the democratic/republican, or socialist/laissez-faire dynamic forever. this would be surprising, since the whole thing is at most a couple of hundred of years old, and both sides are miserably incoherent authoritarianisms. of course brooks also goes for the jonathan haidt chestnut defining liberals as those who oppose authority and conservatives as those who enthuse about it. this too is surprising since every single liberal solution to every single thing is the state the state the state, which is just coercive authority, whatever people may have convinced themselves it is (our collective identity etc). and one thing i want to say about questionnaire research of the haidt variety: it shows either that liberals are anti-authoritarians, or that they are skull-crushingly self-deluded. seriously, i say the data supports either hypothesis equally, which might make one reflect on the methodology just a bit. fortunately we have an external reality - the actual solutions advocated and the actual political system as it stands - by which to measure the truth of this answer.
anyway, at least start grappling with this: people in dallas are more conservative than people in chicago. men are more conservative than women. rich people are more conservative than poor people. white people are more conservative than black people. now, wouldn't this tend to entail that this is at least partly to be explained by, or that it is correlated, with a set of smell facts? we would expect, if this line of research is right, that people from dallas tend to smell different than those from chicago. and of course there is a long traditional history of the claim that poor people smell different than rich people, or black people than white people. or indeed, that their brains are different or that they have different bumps, etc. even y'all can do better than this.