For many years, I’ve been banging on about the injustice of “red” and “blue” in America. Red is for conservative, and blue is for Obamite (in a word) — and that is just bassackwards. It’s an absurd reversal of the historical norms. For eons — or at least since the French Revolution — red has been the color of socialism or leftism, and blue has been the color of conservatism. The red rose is the symbol of socialist parties and movements everywhere.

In Britain, the Conservatives are known as “Team Blue.” The color of Labour is red. This is exactly how Nature intended it. (UKIP is purple. I don’t know whether Mother Nature has weighed in on UKIP, though Farage is certainly a force of nature.)

I know a lost cause when I see one, so I have largely given up banging on about America’s color confusion. But I gave a little start when seeing David French refer to conservative culture as “red culture” (in this post).

That’s because I have been doing some work on China recently, and, in China, “red culture” is a live term. It basically refers to all things having to do with Mao, the early CCP, the Cultural Revolution, and true-blue Communism (so to speak).

One of Mao’s grandchildren is a woman named Kong Dongmei — who, with her husband, is one of the richest people in all of China, but let that pass. She was born in 1972 and studied at the University of Pennsylvania, among other institutions. When she came home from America, she opened a bookstore dedicated to promoting a “new red culture.” (Sometimes “red” is spelled with a capital R. Kong Dongmei, by the way, is a “Red descendant,” or “red descendant” — heiress to the Party elite.)

In 2010, China Daily found Kong Dongmei surrounded by portraits and quotations of Mao, as well as posters of Lenin, Gandhi, and Che Guevara.

Just let me say, that’s what many dorm rooms looked like when I was in college.

Anyway, “red culture,” referring to us? Are country music, NASCAR, and “Don’t Tread on Me” to be components of “red culture”? Shouldn’t that be the guillotine and the gulag? I guess I have to go with the flow, linguistic and otherwise. Still, I start, shudder, and bridle, just a bit.