In software we often fall into using aesthetic terms - "elegant", "clumsy", "clean", "smelly", "tangled", "clear" - to describe properties of a codebase that please or displease us, that we feel good or bad about. We don't see software itself as an aesthetic object, a work of art, but we convey technical value judgements which might be difficult to justify in detail via this sort of terminology.
The theory that people's political leanings are just proxies for their deep-down yucks and yums isn't quite right, I think. it's more that we have intuitions about what's good and bad in social organisation and public life that would be onerous to justify in detail, and resort to the language of yucks and yums to convey those intuitions. The real value judgements involved are quite conflicted and contradictory, and making them explicit would involve tremendous work.