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Reminds me of the time I heard from someone much older than me that Democrats and Republicans switched from being red or blue almost every year until 2000 when
by culi 5y ago
Reminds me of the time I heard from someone much older than me that Democrats and Republicans switched from being red or blue almost every year until 2000 when the election results were so uncertain that people got used to seeing red=Republican and blue=Democrat for weeks and the color scheme just ended up becoming permanent.
As a (younger) politics junkie I was shocked even though it makes total sense and I've always kinda felt they should've been switched.
- monkeybutton 5y ago[flagged]
- culi 5y agoLiberal in most of the rest of the world usually means something similar to "neoliberal" which is usually thought of as a moderate or conservative ideology. When you say liberal, do you mean it in the way it's used in the US (a stand-in for "leftist") or the way it's used in the rest of the world?
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoRed is almost uniformly a more-left/pro-labor political color outside the U.S.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoMore left than conservative, but not leftist in the blanket sense usually used in the US.
- nopenopenopeno 5y agoRed has been the symbolic color of every socialist movement since the French Revolution.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoYou are correct and I intended to reply to a different comment! I was distracted by my pup while eating dinner.
- monkeybutton 5y agoFrom what I understand, I'm using it in the neoliberal sense.
- nopenopenopeno 5y agoIn America, “conservative” and “liberal” both mean neoliberal.
- gurkendoktor 5y agoThis is a recent development. When gay marriage was less popular among voters a couple decades ago, "conservative" meant "neoconservatism", which was exactly the same as neoliberalism, but without the LGBT+. (I hope that I have now successfully offended every political ideology that claims to have centuries of philosophical backing behind it.)
- nopenopenopeno 5y agoHaha, you’re right.
- yongjik 5y agoAnd then there's Korea, where every party is re-created every few years. In the past decades liberals tried green, yellow, and (currently) blue. Conservatives had blue, red, pink, and now back to red.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sgustard 5y agoVery true, "red" and "blue" had no political meaning in my childhood. Another source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-republicans-were-blue-and-democrats-were-red-104176297/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-republicans-were...
- arittr 5y agoThis is probably the single most impactful thing I’ve read on HN. My mind is blown.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Very true, “red” and “blue” had no political meaning in my childhood “Red” had a very long established political meaning before the new one for “Republican” was adopted, visible in phrases like “better dead than Red”. “Blue” didn’t, though.
- bradknowles 5y agoYou never heard of a “blue dog democrat”?
- hnbad 5y agoI'm not sure if you're joking but the only reference I can find is the "Blue Dog Coalition" which takes its name from "being choked blue" and the term "yellow dog Democrat", which in turn seems to refer to what now goes by "vote blue no matter who" in the sense of "they would vote for a yellow dog as long as it is Democrat", which in turn uses "yellow dog" to refer to "low value" American dogs with no genetic link to any established European dog breed. Whew, what a ride for a non-American to figure out what any of these idioms are supposed to mean.
- Tagbert 5y ago“blue dog democrat” Was a term for some conservatives, mostly living in the US south, who were registered as Democrats. When Nixon executed his “southern strategy”, many of those democrats switch to the Republican Party and are probably a big reason why that party switched from a moderately conservative, corporatist party to what it is today.
- asow92 5y agoGreat video on this here: https://youtu.be/yD0POrq1UFk https://youtu.be/yD0POrq1UFk
- gumby 5y agoLeft and right themselves just refer to where groups sat in the revolutionary National Assembly. At this point the terms, like “conservative”, have become labels without meaning in US politics.
- sleepychu 5y agoDid that propagate to other countries afterwards then? For example left and right in the UK have the same meaning as I understand them to have in the US although of course in the US all parties are right of what the UK would call centre.
- gumby 5y agoYes, although as far as I know the terms weren’t popular until communism started to emerge in late 19 th century Europe
- johannes1234321 5y agoLooking at parliament's the left-right thing the French created spread. Not to the UK however. In the British Parliament seating is based on governing party (right side of the Speaker (Commons) or right side of the Throne (House of Lords) and the opposition on the other side) However for example in Germany there was a relatively big debate earlier in this legislative period, when the liberal party (FDP) wanted to move to the center, switching seats with the conservatives (CDU/CSU) to move away from the far right party (AfD) The "traditional" left-right spectrum was a key argument in the debate.
- hnbad 5y agoI'd agree that calling the Dems and GOP "left and right" is somewhat meaningless but historically the left-right spectrum was originally about "power to the people" vs "power to the king" and has been generalized to "hierarchies bad" vs "hierarchies good". Of course this is a spectrum because there are many dimensions in which politics can be "left" or "right" (e.g. social norms, welfare, spending, policing, regulations). The problem with the Democrats and the Republicans isn't that they're two coherent parties. They're both parent organizations for state-level parties which can be politically extremely different from each other. And those parties can themselves be ideologically incoherent because people join them simply because there is no point in joining a third party instead, not to mention that in some cases in-party election (e.g. the primaries) allow non-members to vote, which further messes with their political coherence. And don't even get me started on how PACs and big donors affect campaigning.