Raise The Black Banner

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.