Hacker News Reader

Comment by torgard | Hacker News Reader

> The last bit is culture. Color in each culture is widely different.

One thing that confused me a great deal when I was younger: In the political system that I was familiar with, a "red" party is left-leaning. But in the United States, "red" is right-leaning.

Apparently, this convention is also extremely recent; only since the 2000 elections has red-is-Republican and blue-is-Democrat been agreed upon.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Con...

View on HN

Republican and Democrat left/right leaning used to be swapped though https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-part...

I’ve been wondering if it is because of Americans’ phobia of socialism? Democrats don’t (generally) want to be seen as socialists, so they can’t embrace the red of the American flag more than the blue.

That's not a bad hypothesis, but then why pick the color most strongly associated with communism?

I don't think there was any real picking involved on the part of the parties... Election maps would use red and blue, but that was a very intermittent thing to look at (once every four years for most people; voter turnout in the US was abysmally low, and who knows how many voters actually watched the results with interest). And each network would kinda randomly assign them to each party, without even agreement over which is which from one network to another. And then it finally settled into consistency in 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Con...

Maybe I misunderstand your comment, but my point is they didn’t. Communism/socialism is red, and the US is blue+red. If the “left” side of US politics feel a need to distance themselves from socialism, they need to claim blue as their main color. No one is likely to mistake Republicans for communists so it’s safe for them to use red.

Another way to put the same argument is that Democrats are centrists/liberals rather than left wing/socialists, so the red used by actual left-wing parties in other countries just doesn’t fit.

Apologies, I meant to say why would Republicans pick red in that case, since they're even more anti-communist, but forgot to be specific enough in expressing that

Reply on news.ycombinator.com