Asymmetrical Information

I think it was the Motley Fool that had an election contest back in 2000. I remember one of the questions was which party would be blue on the network's national maps and which would be red. (Other questions involved controlling the House and Senate, by how many seats, and the Presidential election winner.)

Since you only had to send in your guesses by the day before Election Day, it was easy to discover that the networks were using Red for the GOP and Blue for the Dems. (By the way, how did it happen that they all used the same coloring scheme?)

My recollection is that it was the other way around for the previous Presidential election (though 1996 was pretty boring, I may be remembering the 1992 election). I suspect that some (unbiased but voted for McGovern) network type decided the Dems shouldn't be red because that might imply they were Communist.

On a related note, has anyone noticed that the old (and usually renamed) Communist parties in Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics are now considered _conservative_. At least that what the unbiased networks tell me. I'm not sure whether that makes Stalin a Republican or a Democrat... but I think I can guess what the networks would tell me.

Barely relevant data point: On the first electoral map I ever saw (some local TV station in Tulsa, 1984), Republicans were blue and Democrats were red. That is, Minnesota and Washington D.C. were both red for Walter Mondale and the rest of the map was entirely blue.

From '84 to 2000, other maps I saw were nearly always blue or red but about 50/50 for which color meant which party.

In war games as played by the US at any rate, blue is "friendly", red is "OP Force".
Hence the term blue on blue for casualties by "friendly" fire.
I think it says something about the networks' mindset that they picked blue for the dems; it confused me no end, either because I associated blue with repubs for same reason, or somewhere in the past the colors were reversed. I'm not sure which.

Hmm.

Well, conservatives sure aren't green. And we sure as hell aren't yellow. Red is communist, and personally, I always associate brown with Nazis.

White and black are right out. Too many racial overtones. And wasn't purple coopted by gay rights? As well as the rainbow.

Orange is just kind of silly.

I nominate gray. I think it has a connotation of wise adherence to reality, don't you?

Well, the "Red" designation comes from the "Red Army", which were pro-Communist forces during the Russian Civil War. They were opposed by the White Army, or anti-Communist forces (the Whites were more anti than pro anything, but many of them were pro-royalty). "Pinko" is a term of derision started by Americans who wanted to insult Communists.

You couldn't call the Right "White" because they're definately anti-royalty. There really wasn't any other color choices that came out of the Russian Civil War. Maybe if they had more fashion designers in the ranks...

James

How about some sort of Plad motiff? To show how inclusive, open minded and flexible the Pack is? : )

"Conservative" isn't an old Navajo word meaning "opposed to abortion and taxes"; in its original usage, it just meant "damned suspicious of change" (or, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it.")

I seem to recall that when Bill Buckley founded the National Review back in the Age of Eisenhower he (Buckley, not Ike) announced that the new publication intended "to stand athwart history and cry, 'NO!' to modernity" or something vaguely (real vaguely) like that. Isn't that what the unreconstructed commies in the former East Bloc are doing? Of course, there is a difference: The local history athwart which the commies stand is unmistakably idiotic; Buckley's wasn't. The value of change depends on what's being changed and on what you're changing it to, not so? The people we call "conservatives" in the US favor conserving "old ways" which are in many cases quite sensible, or at worst open to reasonable debate.

On the other hand, there are some "old ways" which many if not most modern US conservatives aren't fond of at all -- segregation, for example. We can see from this that the word "conservative" has certainly taken on a life of its own beyond its old literal meaning, but when people use it to refer to ex-KGB thugs in mufti, they're remembering (and conserving, if you like) an older, less idiomatic usage.

Excercise for the aspiring etymologist: Compare and contrast "conservative" and "conservationist".

The red flag was adopted at the First International 1889 as the symbol of the labor movement:

Our modern celebration of Mayday as a working class holiday developed from the US workers struggle for the eight hour day in 1886. The working class movement in the USA began campaigning for an eight hour day in the 1860s, following the Civil War. The historic strike of May 1st, 1886 was a culmination of a concerted struggle. Chicago was the major industrial centre of the USA. Police attacked striking workers from the McCormack Harvester Co., killing six.

On May 4th at a demonstration in Haymarket Square to protest the police brutality a bomb exploded in the middle of a crowd of police killing eight of them. The police arrested eight anarchist trade unionists claiming they threw the bombs. To this day the subject is still one of controversy. The question remains whether the bomb was thrown by the workers at the police or whether one of the police's own agent provocateurs dropped it in their haste to retreat from charging workers.

In what was to become one of the most infamous show trials in America in the 19th century, but certainly not to be the last of such trials against radical workers, the State of Illinois tried the anarchist workingmen for fighting for their rights as much as being the actual bomb throwers. Whether the anarchist workers were guilty or innocent was irrelevant. They were agitators, fomenting revolution and stirring up the working class, and they had to be taught a lesson. Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engle and Adolph Fischer were found guilty and executed by the State of Illinois.

In Paris in 1889 the International Working Men's Association (the First International) declared May 1st an international working class holiday in commemoration of the Haymarket Martyrs. The red flag became the symbol of the blood of working class martyrs in their battle for workers rights. Conservatives, as mentioned above, don't stand for a specific program, but rather they stand for conserving whatever they find that has been around long enough to seem old. As such, they don't and can't have a flag; for it would mean different things to different conservatives.

Indeed, much of what American conservatives these days are busy conserving is American socialism, in the forms implemented as the New Deal and the Great Society. So, along with the red white and blue they could easily wave the red flag to denote their support for income taxation, labor union legal privileges, social security, the 8 hour work day, unemployment "insurance", workplace regulation, etc.

Well, it's blue of course. As in 'Tory blue.' Because the conservatives always stood for the established class, the blue-bloods.

In the UK, it's always blue. The Liberal Democrats (vestige of the old LIberal party) are yellow.

I have herad the BBC refer to former-communist parties in Russia as 'right-wing'.

I propose that future party color designations shall use chartruse and fuscha (sp?). They're roughly opposites on the color spectrum, which is appropriately symbolic, but good luck to anyone who tries to derive narrowly-defined meanings beyond that.

I think PJ has it right. Here are my own thoughts on the question from early in November:
www.seanet.com/~jimxc/Politics/November2002_1.html#jrm331,
along with a link to another set of ideas.

I seem to remember that Nancy Reagan wore a gown she called "electric blue" to Ron's second inaugural ball, because that's the color the country became on TV, as state after state went for Reagan. I couldn't find it via Google.

I did learn more than I ever wanted to know about inaugural gowns, though. Bleah.

One of the networks does use blue for Republicans ... can't remember which one.

The RNC in its maps uses blue for Republicans and red for Democrats. Anybody know what the DNC uses in the maps it prints?

There's a book out that shows political party representation in Congress for every election through 1986. Each party has its distinct color. Republicans - blue; Democrats - red; Whigs - orange; Federalists - light green; etc.

James,

>>""Pinko" is a term of derision started by Americans who wanted to insult Communists."

Not so. "Pinko" refers to someone who is not actually RED, (i.e. Communist), but who favors Communism. Initially, the term was simply "Pink". Calling a Communist "Pink" would have been a compliment, not an insult.

Gray is the color of the elephant.

Curiously, green is a shade of pink.

I think it's informative to look at Great Britain and Canada, two countries whose partisan governmental models are most closely related to the US. In the UK (as was mentioned), Labour is red and the Conservative Party is blue; in Canada, the Liberals are red and the Progressive Conservatives are blue. The logic seems to be, then, that conservative or 'right-wing' parties are blue while liberal or 'left-wing' parties are red. That's why there's confusion over Republican red and Democrat blue.

But, though I don't know the historical source of the red/blue split in the US, I think it's actually more descriptive -- after all, the Republican Party was not, historically, a conservative party. It was a whig party, heir of the capital-W Whig Party which arose in response to the Jacksonian Democrats. One big complaint against the Jacksonians was a common whig complaint about tories -- they were a court-party. The Whigs, and later the Republicans, were by far the more progressive of the two main parties. Though things got mixed around in the mid-twentieth century, I think you could argue that the same division is re-emerging, with Democrats becoming a 'conservative' party wedded to decades-old welfare statism while the Republicans struggle to create a forward-looking platform.

Pro-free-markets, pro-social-freedoms, that's the true whig tradition. As the Republican Party (hopefully) moves away from social-conservatism and towards liberty, it will once again become a natural heir to the whig-red label.

Conservative rightists are blue because they are blue-blooded.

Fascist rightists are black or brown, depending on the country (Irish Fascists wore blueshirts, IIRC, but they were atypical).

Laissez-faire rightists don't have a colour because laissez-faire is in general the ideology of the comfortable, so they have never taken to the streets. Or to put it another way, the colour of the business-interest section of the right is whatever colour the police and army happen to sport.

Cons and libertarians are Red, White and Blue for the USA while the Dems and liberals are just Red and white. Red for their adoration of Communism and white for their surrender flags.

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