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Alternate Terminology: Preservatives, Mountaineers and Skepticals

One could of course have gun nuts with this article and probably written an entire book solely devoted to the nature and history of political terminology, so I hardly blame you for not including this, but I've always been a bit amused by how both the Canadian Liberal Party and the Australian Liberal Party are kind of the successors of the British Liberal Party. The Canadians just went straight for the name of the party of Palmerston and Gladstone when they were founded as the merger of the Anglo Grits and the Franco Rouges, whereas the Australian Liberals choose their name in honour of the by then defunct Commonwealth Liberal Party, which in turn had been named in honour of the British Liberal Party.

And of course, there's my favourite ideological descendants of the British Liberals, the Liberal Party of Utah that operated before that territory received statehood. Since the People's Party was basically the political wing of the Mormon Church, those settlers in Utah who were either dissidents from the Mormons or had never been Mormons (and many early settlers in Utah came directly from Great Britain) took the name Liberal for their party in honour of the British.

A final amusing thing, something that I brought up a few weeks ago, I found this Swedish fellow who had travelled around in the United States in the early 1830s, commenting, as so many Europeans visiting America at the time (see for example de Tocqueville) on the quaintness of American electoral politics. He notes that there are many different names for the different political factions in America at the time, bringing up the names "Jacksonians", "Democrats", "National Republicans", but that nowadays one side seems to have settled for Whigs, and they are calling their opponents Tories, and makes the prediction that in a few years, the two parties in the United States will be known as Tories and Whigs. Though the opponents to the Democrats did indeed keep on using the name Whigs for a long time, interestingly, even though they did accuse 'King Andrew I' and his followers of being Tories, that name never caught on. Of course, my favourite comment the Swedish author makes on the political landscape is noting with some confusion that apparently the anti-masonic movement seems to have their very own political party in America.
 
One could of course have gun nuts with this article and probably written an entire book solely devoted to the nature and history of political terminology, so I hardly blame you for not including this, but I've always been a bit amused by how both the Canadian Liberal Party and the Australian Liberal Party are kind of the successors of the British Liberal Party. The Canadians just went straight for the name of the party of Palmerston and Gladstone when they were founded as the merger of the Anglo Grits and the Franco Rouges, whereas the Australian Liberals choose their name in honour of the by then defunct Commonwealth Liberal Party, which in turn had been named in honour of the British Liberal Party.

And of course, there's my favourite ideological descendants of the British Liberals, the Liberal Party of Utah that operated before that territory received statehood. Since the People's Party was basically the political wing of the Mormon Church, those settlers in Utah who were either dissidents from the Mormons or had never been Mormons (and many early settlers in Utah came directly from Great Britain) took the name Liberal for their party in honour of the British.

A final amusing thing, something that I brought up a few weeks ago, I found this Swedish fellow who had travelled around in the United States in the early 1830s, commenting, as so many Europeans visiting America at the time (see for example de Tocqueville) on the quaintness of American electoral politics. He notes that there are many different names for the different political factions in America at the time, bringing up the names "Jacksonians", "Democrats", "National Republicans", but that nowadays one side seems to have settled for Whigs, and they are calling their opponents Tories, and makes the prediction that in a few years, the two parties in the United States will be known as Tories and Whigs. Though the opponents to the Democrats did indeed keep on using the name Whigs for a long time, interestingly, even though they did accuse 'King Andrew I' and his followers of being Tories, that name never caught on. Of course, my favourite comment the Swedish author makes on the political landscape is noting with some confusion that apparently the anti-masonic movement seems to have their very own political party in America.
That could make an article in itself - perhaps you may want to write it?
 
That could make an article in itself - perhaps you may want to write it?

Maybe at some point in the future. I currently have promised @AndyC an article by the title Guilty Pleasures that basically just briefly tells the story of how some details that we these days take for granted, such as coffee, tea, and tobacco, are actually things that one cannot just take for granted will be there in the same form in any given timeline.
 
It's kind of surprising that the classical bent of the Enlightenment didn't result in optimates and populares being revived as terms - something like "populists" for the political left and "optimists" for the right.

The idea of montagnard persisting as a term has me thinking about Anna Louise Strong and her communist mountaineering clubs - maybe as good an occasion as any to have the word enter English as a political epithet. Although I could see a way the meaning could be reversed, too - the indigenous groups that allied with the US during the Vietnam War were referred to as montagnards because of where they lived, right? What if that were to drift into contemporary Marxist-Leninist jargon as a term for imperialist collaborators?
 
Thanks for the shoutout.

Would be quite keen to do a List at some point in which the English Civil War factions solidified as the names of the political parties when they emerged.

Perhaps a tepid take, but I do like how parties which call themselves centrist often have wildly differing interpretations of what the word means - the Dutch Centre Party being very right-wing in objective terms, and that of Australia being genuinely Fascist, for instance. Even within Nordic Centre Parties, the main ideological throughline is (ironically) a penchant for decentralisation, and there's a fair amount of bespoke ideas that don't carry through to the other parties.

(Side note, when the Swedish Farmers' Union wanted to change their name to the Centre Party, they had to make a deal with the remains of the previous Centre Party, which had been in favour of eugenics and attracted criticism for issuing ballots entitled 'Social Democrats' in big letters and then their actual name in a small typeface underneath. Thee ballots also included the names of various prominent Social Democrats without the consent of said individuals.)

I'm also quite a big fan of Wrecker Parties which contest elections with confusing names in order to wreck the chances of more major parties - that Literal Democrat guy being the obvious example in the UK, but also the 'Ecologist Greens' who prevented the Actual Greens from winning a seat in the Spanish Euro elections of 1989 and who, upon further investigation, thought that the belief that oil spills are bad was in fact anti-Human Race bigotry.
 
Another thought: Leftists are often known as "reds" because red is the color of socialism/communism. The usage of the red flag as a symbol of the left dates back to the French Revolution, with the Jacobins using as a symbol of martyrdom and revolt. This stuck around in French politics, and in the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune, at which point it became associated with far-left politics internationally. Had the Jacobins chosen a different color we would probably refer to leftists as "blues" or "yellows" or whatever.
 
Another thought: Leftists are often known as "reds" because red is the color of socialism/communism. The usage of the red flag as a symbol of the left dates back to the French Revolution, with the Jacobins using as a symbol of martyrdom and revolt. This stuck around in French politics, and in the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune, at which point it became associated with far-left politics internationally. Had the Jacobins chosen a different color we would probably refer to leftists as "blues" or "yellows" or whatever.
See also the use of the name Colorado (in practice meaning Red) by a right-wing party in Paraguay and an Establishment party in Uruguay due to home-grown colour symbolism.
 
I've made the point before that it's quite feasible in a world where Britain was the nation that went Communist first we'd see the new regime making use of green over red for iconography even with the other influences. Especially if there was a civil war in which the revolution had to defeat an army usually symbolised with red coats.
 
Another thought: Leftists are often known as "reds" because red is the color of socialism/communism. The usage of the red flag as a symbol of the left dates back to the French Revolution, with the Jacobins using as a symbol of martyrdom and revolt. This stuck around in French politics, and in the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune, at which point it became associated with far-left politics internationally. Had the Jacobins chosen a different color we would probably refer to leftists as "blues" or "yellows" or whatever.
I nearly brought this into this article, but decided I may spin it off to a different one.
 
I do like the idea of a Preservative Party, if only for the fact that generations of German teenagers will find it hilarious. That is, assuming that in that timeline Germans still use the word “Preservatif” for “Condom”.
 
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