As a Canadian I’m used to the color red representing the center-left party, and the color blue representing the right-of-center party. In many other countries red is synonymous with socialist and communist parties. So I’ve always found it kind of weird that the opposite is true in the United States: red is so associated with the right-wing Republicans, and blue with the left-ish Democrats, that parts of the country dominated by one party are called “red states” or “blue states.”
It feels like it should be the other way around. Thanks for nothing, New York Times.
In 1976, NBC debuted its first election map on the air, with bulbs that turned red for Carter-won states (Democratic), and blue for Ford (Republican). This original color scheme was based on Great Britain's political system, which used red to denote the more liberal party. However, other stations used different colors and designations for a variety of ideological and aesthetic reasons, which often differed from person to person.
The color coding we're familiar with today didn't stick until the iconic (and extremely lengthy) election of 2000, when The New York Times and USA Today published their first full-color election maps. The Times spread used red for Republicans because "red begins with r, Republican begins with r," said the senior graphics editor Archie Tse, "it was a more natural association." The election, which didn't end until mid-December, firmly established Democrats as the blue party and Republicans as the red — denotations which will likely hold fast for some time to come.
According to Tom Nichols, however, there’s actually a pretty good reason to associate the GOP with the color red. It’s effectively become the spiritual successor of the moribund Communist Party of the Soviet Union in its final years:
…I do not mean that modern American Republicans are communists. Rather, I mean that the Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate its fortunes.
No one thinks much about the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, and no one really should. This was a time referred to by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, as the vremia zastoia—“the era of stagnation.” By that point, the Soviet Communist Party was a spent force, and ideological conviction was mostly for chumps and fanatics. A handful of party ideologues and the senior officers of the Soviet military might still have believed in “Marxism-Leninism”—the melding of aspirational communism to one-party dictatorship—but by and large, Soviet citizens knew that the party’s formulations about the rights of all people were just window dressing for rule by a small circle of old men in the Kremlin.
“The party” itself was not a party in any Western sense, but a vehicle for a cabal of elites, with a cult of personality at its center. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was an utterly mediocre man, but by the late 1970s he had cemented his grip on the Communist Party by elevating opportunists and cronies around him who insisted, publicly and privately, that Brezhnev was a heroic genius. Factories and streets and even a city were named for him, and he promoted himself to the top military rank of “Marshal of the Soviet Union.” He awarded himself so many honors and medals that, in a common Soviet joke of the time, a small earthquake in Moscow was said to have been caused by Brezhnev’s medal-festooned military overcoat falling off its hanger.
I’ll just leave this here.
Members of the Communist Party who questioned anything, or expressed any sign of unorthodoxy, could be denounced by name, or more likely, simply fired. They would not be executed—this was not Stalinism, after all—but some were left to rot in obscurity in some make-work exile job, eventually retiring as a forgotten “Comrade Pensioner.” The deal was clear: Pump the party’s nonsense and enjoy the good life, or squawk and be sent to manage a library in Kazakhstan.
This should all sound familiar.
The Republican Party has, for years, ignored the ideas and principles it once espoused, to the point where the 2020 GOP convention simply dispensed with the fiction of a platform and instead declared the party to be whatever Comrade—excuse me, President—Donald Trump said it was.
Like Brezhnev, Trump has grown in status to become a heroic figure among his supporters. If the Republicans could create the rank of “Marshal of the American Republic” and strike a medal for a “Hero of American Culture,” Trump would have them both by now.
A GOP that once prided itself on its intellectual debates is now ruled by the turgid formulations of what the Soviets would have called their “leading cadres,” including ideological watchdogs such as Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin. Like their Soviet predecessors, a host of dull and dogmatic cable outlets, screechy radio talkers, and poorly written magazines crank out the same kind of fill-in-the-blanks screeds full of delusional accusations, replacing “NATO” and “revanchism” with “antifa” and “radicalism.”
If anything, Nichols understates the garbage that is showing up in pro-Trump magazines and “news” outlets these days. I can’t say I’m too familiar with “American Greatness,” but I don’t remember that site being this bonkers even in 2016.
I’ve been waiting over five years for the Republican Party to finally turn its back on Trump, and I naively assumed his election defeat - taking down GOP control of the Senate with it - would finally rid us of him and his cultish supporters. Sadly, I underestimated the degree to which he has the rank and file under his spell.
Even Mitt Romney concedes that the 2024 Presidential nomination is Trump’s to lose:
Senator Mitt Romney said that he believes former President Donald Trump would win the Republican presidential nomination if he ran for office in 2024.
"He has by far the largest voice and a big impact in my party," Romney said at a New York Times DealBook virtual event on Tuesday. "I don't know if he'll run in 2024 or not, but if he does, I'm pretty sure he will win the nomination."
Romney, the GOP presidential nominee in 2012, said that "a lot can happen between now and 2024," adding that he is not "great at predicting."
However, he said he expects the former president to continue to play a big role in the Republican Party, which faces an internal identity crisis following Mr. Trump's second impeachment trial.
"I look at the polls, and the polls show that among the names being floated as potential contenders in 2024, if you put President Trump in there among Republicans, he wins in a landslide," the Utah senator said.
Romney, and the handful of other Republicans who voted to impeach and convict Trump after the Beer Gut Putsch, believe there’s some hope for reforming the party. Just like Gorbachev believed, to the bitter end, that there was some hope for successfully reforming Soviet Communism. And we know how that turned out.
Speaking of the Soviet Union, I’ll give them this much: they made some very cool airplanes.
The Antonov AN-225, the world’s largest plane, was built to carry the Soviet Buran space shuttle, and there were even plans to use it for launching spacecraft in midair. The USSR collapsed before these ambitious plans could happen, but the AN-225 - now carrying the flag of independent Ukraine - found a new life as a one-of-a-kind transport plane.
It was never going to be over with the election defeat. It’s a cult, it does not operate in reality. Exactly like a narcissistic abuser, Trump will keep gaslighting his followers; if nothing else, to maintain control over them in case he wants them...
Also, it’s hard enough to get away from such a person when they manipulate you one on one. Imagine trying to turn your back on an entire movement. Chances are their entire social lives consist of this.
Can you imagine Trump passing up the opportunity to control a large number of such willing supporters? It plays to everything he is - and gives him a measure of actual power, too.