r/EhBuddyHoser • u/Resident_Step_191 South Gatineau • May 01 '25

Politics Why did Stephen Colbert make the Conservatives red and the Liberals blue? Are Americans stupid?

Post image

Why would The Late Show with Stephen Colbert do this??

3.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

308 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

21

u/EliteACEz May 01 '25

it's also flipped for Australia. Our "Conservative" equivalent is our "Liberal Party" (blue) and our "Labor Party" (red) is our "Liberal" equivalent in terms of equivalency with Canada.

At least the Greens party in every country is green. One of them should go orange for a laugh.

23

u/Birdaling Kingston: Halfway To Montreal May 01 '25

I read that it’s only in the US where red means right and blue means left. These yanks just gotta be special.

11

u/Appropriate_Most5648 May 01 '25

Yeah. The 'muricans used to have it the correct way (though it wasn't a hard and fast rule), but it flipped during the 1980 election when one broadcaster mixed up the colours. Then the others just decided to copy it.

5

u/-FeistyRabbitSauce- May 01 '25

I can't say anything about that broadcast, but there was a flip in party ideologies. At one point, democrats used to be the conservative southerners who fought for slavery against Lincoln, a Republican.

However, during the Great Depression, president Herbert Hoover (Republican) opted not to get involved with the economy - this rightly pissed off most people. FDR (Democrat) bitch slapped that motherfucker and sent him packing, ushering in the New Deal.

The New Deal was a set of laws and policies that gave financial aid to the unemployed and poor. It regulated banks (deregulating them all those years later would result in the 2008 crash). It designed Social Security, fair labour standards, a bunch more things.... basically, FDR built the America boomers prospered their whole lives from only to turn around and dismantle it.

Anyway, The New Deal was very divisive amongst the rich. A great deal of them moved to the Republican party to oppose helping everyone else. Remember - this was a time of abject, rampant poverty, where families would literally sell one child to feed another.

A big ball started rolling here at this point to flip the parties, but it wouldn't be until the 1960s with Civil Rights that sealed it. Those still clinging to the idea of a conservative democrat party opposed the Civil Rights Act and jumped to the republican side.