13 Responses to “Raise The Black Banner”

1. tenaciousd, on October 7th, 2008 at 8:28 am Said:

   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.

2. ChrisWWW, on October 7th, 2008 at 9:01 am Said:

   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.

3. Grumpy Old Man, on October 7th, 2008 at 9:31 am Said:

   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.

4. mbtogut, on October 7th, 2008 at 9:32 am Said:

   Ross needs to find something more important to stress out over.

5. jacobus7, on October 7th, 2008 at 10:53 am Said:

   “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.

6. Howard J. Harrison, on October 7th, 2008 at 11:53 am Said:

   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.

7. James Kabala, on October 7th, 2008 at 12:01 pm Said:

   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.)

8. Daniel Larison, on October 7th, 2008 at 12:04 pm Said:

   Here is another account of the evolution of the color-coding.

9. Peter Hoh, on October 7th, 2008 at 12:19 pm Said:

   I thought the modern color system had to do with both Republican and red starting with the same letter.

10. cusanus, on October 7th, 2008 at 4:04 pm Said:

    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.

11. Grumpy Old Man, on October 7th, 2008 at 4:55 pm Said:

    The link “another account” appears to be broken.

12. bayesian, on October 7th, 2008 at 9:05 pm Said:

    @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

13. conradg, on October 8th, 2008 at 12:09 pm Said:

    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.

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