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I thought that the Grey Tribe also had its share of good programmers. But perhaps I am typical-minding here.
Personally, I see modern progressivism as largely performative, you keep your pride flag up to date, do land acknowledgements or whatever is en wogue right now to signal tribe membership.
A few of the great coders I know are conservative at least in their choice of tools. Rather than eagerly awaiting the next release of their IDE, you would have to pry their vim from their cold dead hands and like to compile their code in hand-crafted makefiles using gcc -std=c89 or some such.
While the one behavior does not necessarily preclude the other, a combination of both would nevertheless feel a bit incongruent.
But perhaps this is my own perception, or my own bubble.
There is an old saw that says that a man is often most conservative about what he knows best.
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It does, but it's not the majority. Brendan Eich was clearly brilliant as was Bill Gates, but there's a lot more Gates' just due to programmers largely being the kids of the PMC and inheriting their political affiliations along with the high IQ.
Also, I don't think political/social conservatism and appetite for change are all that correlated. I knew a cracked engineer that was extremely right wing but was always eager to try and asses new technologies and trends. Of course, if it was shit, he would say so, but if it was good he would be the first adopter and bring everyone along as well. YMMV, anecdote != data.
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