Raise The Black Banner
Posted on October 7th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
|
Ross:
The fact that conservative America has been saddled – thanks to the vagaries of network-news color schemes and the closeness of the ‘00 election – with a hue long associated with international Communism and its enablers, while American liberalism gets to claim the color of the sea, the sky, and Frank Sinatra’s eyes, is a small but obnoxious outrage, and as the Right prepares to enter the political wilderness I’m proud to do my part to at least reclaim our rightful color.
What is strangest about the partisan color schemes that have prevailed for the last decade is that they are not only the reverse of the colors that used to be loosely associated with the parties in the twentieth century (a curious detail that seems to have largely been expunged from memory), but they are entirely the opposite of the normal modern association of the color blue with relatively more conservative and nationalist parties and the association of the color red with left-leaning and social democratic parties. My Brownson-inspired cracks about Red Republicans aside, the Republicans today are much more like the political Blues of 20th century European politics. It has been remarkable to see how a completely arbitrary change of colors used by television stations in reporting the Electoral College results in 2000 has caught on and become the basis for widely accepted symbolism for both parties.
Filed under: politics
Hey, come on now. Which American party has been the more “social democratic” party of the last decade? Give credit (ahem!) where it’s due. Medicare Part-D and the largest nationalizations in modern history represent the triumph of social liberalism in America. The Democrats have been the party of trimming and surpluses.
Kind of a weird thing to complain about. At least the GOP gets to be the friendly and giant elephant. The Democrats are stuck with the ass.
You’re right. There’s a weird color switch. The British Labour Party used to sing:
“The workers’ flag is deepest red,
And shrouded oft our martyred dead.
So lift the scarlet banner high,
Beneath her folds we’ll live and die.”
If they had kept blue, he GOP could sing:
The bourgeois flag of deepest blue
Means more for us and less for you
But come along and vote for us
We’ll come by limo, you by bus.
Ross needs to find something more important to stress out over.
“a completely arbitrary change of colors”
I’ll nitpick a little bit: I think that, previously, the networks had used blue for incumbents and red for challengers, but I can’t seem to find any proof for that anywhere.
Somehow I do not remember that red used to stand for the Democratic party, but neither do I doubt your interesting recollection that it did. It does make one remember however that in the nineteenth century the Democratic party was the conservative and the Republican, the radical party—respectively blue and red in the old European sense.
Jacobus7: I know Time (my main source for political news when I was a teenager) always used blue for Republicans and red for Democrats, even in 2000 and even (stubbornly) in the 2002 mid-terms, but they gave in in 2004. Reference books like the Encyclopedia of Congressional Districts (can’t remember if that’s the exact title) also did.
Wikipedia claims that NBC is 1976 was the first to use a color map on TV, with blue for Republicans and red for Democrats, but that by the mid-1990s most (but not all) networks had adopted the reverse scheme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states (See “Origin of current color scheme” subheading.)
Here is another account of the evolution of the color-coding.
I thought the modern color system had to do with both Republican and red starting with the same letter.
Red yang; blue yin. Red hot; blue cool. Red in your face; blue passive, go with the flow. Regardless of the historical associations, the color scheme definitely fits the public face of each of the parties since they came into use in the nineties.
The link “another account” appears to be broken.
@GOM -
It’s http://www.uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/ARTICLES/redblue.php
for some reason our host’s editor put a nofollow tag in the html
I think the color scheme sticks because of the emotional associations with the colors, not the past political associations. Red is the color of anger, of warning, danger, fear, aggression, strength, and for the last decade this well describes Republicans. Blue, on the other hand, describes a kind of coolness, calm, passivity, even weakness, which is what the Democrats have been. So because of this emotional association that generally reflects the emotional qualities of the two parties, we’ve stuck with these colors.