In America, the conservative party is red and the liberal is blue, but in Canada the liberal party is red whole the conservatives are blue.

  • yucandu@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    In America, the conservative party is red and the liberal is blue

    I REMEMBER THE BEFORE TIMES! The long long ago! When not all was as it is today…

  • Quilotoa@lemmy.ca
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    3 hours ago

    Although a Conservative in Canada wouldn’t be a Conservative in the US. In Canada they support abortion, socialized medicine and same sex marriages.

  • Blue@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Isn’t american party colors backwards compared to most western countries?

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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      8 minutes ago

      Yes. This thread is pretty baffling to me to say the least. I wonder if OP is aware there‘s a whole world out there.

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Yeah, it’s a whole thing about neither party wanting to be red during the cold war so news outlets would randomize it until the 2000 election when cable news was involved. People watched a highly contested election 24 hours a day for weeks and just got used to thinking of red as Republican and blue as Democrat. It stuck ever since.

    • Otter@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      Yep

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_colour

      Parties in different countries with similar ideologies sometimes use similar colours. As an example, the colour red symbolizes ideologies further to the left of the political spectrum, sometimes referred to as left-wing politics. In some countries this has also been associated with Communism (leading to the use of such terms as “Red Army” and “Red Scare”). The colour blue is often used for conservatism, politics that lie further to the right of the political spectrum, and thus referred to as “right of centre” or “right wing” politics. In more recent years, the colour yellow has been commonly associated with liberalism and right-libertarianism, while the colour green has an association with Green politics so-named after the ideology’s choice of that colour and concern with environmental issues, also commonly described as being green.[2][3]

    • October@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Makes sense, America is pretty backwards compared to most western countries, so might as well flip the colors

  • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    I was surprised by this, too, moving to New Zealand. Down here National (the center centre-right party) is a light blue color, while Labour is a red-orange. But then there’s ACT (further right than National), which uses a pink color, and NZ First (even further right than ACT), which uses a dark blue color.

    Incidentally, it’s an election year here, too; and from what I’ve gathered, NZ First (the furthest-right of the major parties in New Zealand) somehow manages to still be further left than American Republicans on most issues. National is further left than American Democrats.

    • leadore@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      The color assignments happened by chance. The networks used to arbitrarily choose red or blue or even some other color for each party to show them on the maps, and one network might use different colors than another. Then one year (2000), a year that they were showing R’s as red and D’s as blue, the colors stuck and stayed that way–probably because the counting went on for so long that year.

      https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-republicans-became-red-democrats-became-blue-104176297/

      There are plenty of articles online about the subject. I’m old so I remember it myself.

  • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    IIRC a US journalist invented it for the US. Republicans Red because they both start with R.