All this is more than speculative. Traumatic childhood experience has been shown to bear very directly on adult political orientations. Michael Milburn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, found that the harsher the parenting people were exposed to as young children, the more prone they become to support authoritarian or aggressive policies, such as foreign wars, punitive laws, and the death penalty. “We used physical punishment in childhood as a marker of a dysfunctional family environment,” he told me. “There was significantly more opposition to abortion, and
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