Discuss @Thande 's latest article
Thanks Andy, and good pictures as usual. I did acknowledge @Makemakean at the end before anyone asksDiscuss @Thande 's latest article
Thanks Andy, and good pictures as usual. I did acknowledge @Makemakean at the end before anyone asks
That could make an article in itself - perhaps you may want to write it?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?
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.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.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.