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BY The Conversation

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“Better dead than red.”

Cold War conservatives used to say that, and they meant it: Better to suffer nuclear annihilation, they believed, than endure a “red” victory. And by “red” they meant anyone on the left of the political spectrum—from the Soviet communists to their “fellow travelers” in the U.S.

It’s strange, then, that America’s conservative party, the Republican Party, is now the red one. There’s no ideology behind the switch, no founding decision by either party to claim a color as its own. The whole red-state/blue-state vocabulary is much newer than most people assume.…