Fantastic article. You really get to the core of many of our biases and how those can be manipulated.

As you note, disgust is a protective mechanism that is hard-wired into our brains. Conservatism is about protecting the status quo, literally conserving what we have. That often means protecting against others who may pose a threat to the status quo. That’s not necessarily wrong. The indigenous people of the Americas would have been well served to have disgust of the Spanish conquistadors, who brought with them diseases like measles and smallpox that devastated the local populations.

Using this inborn protective mechanism to manipulate voters into putting one into power is a different matter altogether. For all the reasons that disgust can serve us well, we should be disgusted by those who choose to manipulate us for their own selfish gains.