Lamartine rejects the red flag in 1848.
Red is the international color of socialism. Socialist parties use, or used, it everywhere. Communist nations, whose economic system was socialist, almost all used red flags. France's socialist party uses a red rose as its symbol.
So how did we, in the US, end up with red states and blue states? It truly confuses me. The red states are the most conservative ones, and the blue states the most liberal ones. The US doesn't have very many true socialist, but on a red blue scale shouldn't that be reversed?
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Postscript
I posted this originally on September 9, 2014.
Since that time one surprising thing that has occurred is that a bonafide socialist, Bernie Sanders, has not only been running within the Democratic Party for the Presidency, but he's been doing well in his run. He beat Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire yesterday and he nearly beat her in Iowa a couple of weeks ago. Lots of young people, perhaps not really knowing what they are declaring, are now self identifying as socialist.
Which makes the press's ongoing use of the "red state" moniker to describe Republican states nonsensical and moronic. In this election, we have one person who really identifies with the red rose of socialism. In her effort to try to head him off at the Democratic pass, the other candidate is lurching towards the left. Just last week the socialist declared Wall Street to be a "broken model" and Clinton has been trying to distance herself from Wall Street, which of course is in her own adopted home state. And there's no longer hardly any pretense in the Democratic Party this year of not being a left wing party.
So, press, red is the color of the hard left. Fix your analogy.
3 comments:
When I first heard the whole Red State vs. Blue State talk I wondered the same thing.
Since the media/lobbyists that came up with the idea tend to lean to the Democrats, it's reasonable that they would also realize that the color Red is associated with everything you outlined. So I would guess that they didn't call the Democrat-leaning states the Red States because it would hit too close to the truth.
Besides all that, simplifying everything political to a Red State vs. Blue State argument oversimplifies everything too much.
It does simplify things way to much. I've heard them try to take this out to further color analogies, but that is even sillier. Colorado, for example, is a Purple State.
We here are supposedly a Red State, but in the primary the tea party candidates did very poorly. There are not very many Democratic candidates, so for the most part the election is now over. So what's that make us, a Red, but not Deep Red, state? Or perhaps we're Maroon, and not Crimson.
To take this out to the reductio ad absurdum level, it occurs to me that if we stayed with the global historical norm, and accepted that it became fixed during the Russian Civil War (although read as the color of socialism was established prior to that) we'd have have the blue states be red states, and the red states would have to be white states, given as the contestants at that time used the established color scheme of red representing the left, and established that white represented the right. Hence the combatants in the Russian Civil War being the Reds and the Whites.
Except that omits the Greens, who were agrarian anarchists. We don't really have agrarian anarchists in the US, and they've fallen out of favor everywhere, but perhaps the Libertarians or people who are inclined towards libertarian views could be the Greens, that being our closest sort of equivalent.
Except that there are Greens in Europe already who would not fit this color scheme. They'd probably have to adopt some shade of red. And green is already the color of Islam, so that might offend Islamists, although it presumably wouldn't offend ISIL, which has adopted black as its color.
Oh well. Perhaps people in the US ought to just go back to knowing what they are, and use red, white and blue, like they used to.
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