Election 2016

What COLOR is Hillary Clinton?

What COLOR is globalism?

PURPLE

Clinton is an insider's insider. She has demonstrated a deep commitment to maintaining or increasing first her personal power, secondarily her patrons' power, and then she might start thinking about her party's or her country's power. With her husband, she's been willing to work with any RED, BLUE or PURPLE who's interested in further concentrating political, economic or social power into their hands.

While there is fierce and sometimes deadly conflict among factions of the globalist elites, they're all motivated by the same basic proposition:

"All the worlds eggs should be in one basket."

The fighting is over who owns the basket. If a few eggs get broken in the process, there's that many more omelets to serve up to their subordinates. And the drama of conflict draws attention away from the innumerable ways globalists cooperate to make sure outsiders aren't permitted to play in any of their games.

What COLOR is Donald Trump?

What COLOR is nationalism?

PURPLE-GRAY

Why do so many REDS and ORANGES and YELLOWS prefer Trump to the other Republican candidates?

Trump is popular among conservatives simply by being a successful businessman. Nothing succeeds like success and conservatives tend to value results over intentions or procedural justice. The fact that Trump doesn't have to go around begging a bunch of donors for support, also means he's nobody's puppet. Conservatives like to vote for self-made men.

There's also a large anti-PURPLE sentiment among the ORANGE and YELLOW grassroots of the Republican party. They feel that a PURPLE-GRAY billionaire is more likely to represent their interests than a PURPLE-RED candidate like Rubio. PURPLE-RED elected officials have a tendency to sell out ORANGE and YELLOW interests well before push comes to shove. The PURPLE-RED establishment has been pushing PURPLE-RED candidates down the grassroots' throats every election cycle since Reagan and now the base is revolting.

There are also a lot of marginally interested voters who are coming out in droves to vote for Trump. He's GRAY enough to appeal to the average people who don't obsess about politics. He speaks in simple language and has a clear message that appeals to low-information voters. Trump has turned the election into political Survivor for the reality-TV-loving masses. Those voters are why Trump has a yuuge lead over the ORANGE-RED Cruz.

Shifting Colors

Real life is a lot messier than any chart or axis I'm likely to come up with. The scattered, clumpy, shifting patterns in the image below are a little bit closer to how politics actually works.

NOTE: If none of the circles are moving, your browser isn't set up to handle animated SVG images. Sorry.

Each circle in the image can be seen as a particular faction or ideology coming into and out of power or popularity. Multiple colors converging represents how coalitions form and break up. Individual dots moving away from the center are becoming more extreme, while those drifting towards the center are becoming less so.

Politics is messy, but politics is built up from the individual choices of many people. When you step back from these recurring factional battles, the broader political patterns represented on the Asplund Chart emerge.

Disjointed Spectrums

The GREEN-centered and PURPLE-centered full spectrums create narratives that favor some kind of centrist compromise. Two disjointed spectrums can be created by combining the left half of one full spectrum with the right half of the other. Unlike the full spectrums, these two ways of arranging the political universe leave no room for a centrist compromise. Both disjointed spectrums have several interpretations, some favored by realists and the others by more ideologically motivated people.

Disjointed Spectrum A

Disjointed Spectrum A is favored by some people of four different color profiles: GREEN-AQUA, GREEN-YELLOW, PURPLE-BLUE and PURPLE-RED. Each color group uses the same disjointed spectrum to tell a very different story about politics.

LEFT-RIGHT AXIS	TRUE LEFT	TRUE RIGHT	GOOD	EVIL	FOOLISH	INSANE
Spectrum 3	FAR LEFT	FAR RIGHT	AQUA- GREEN	RED- PURPLE	BLUE- PURPLE	YELLOW- GREEN
Spectrum 3	FAR LEFT	FAR RIGHT	RED- PURPLE	AQUA- GREEN	YELLOW- GREEN	BLUE- PURPLE
Spectrum 4	LEFT TYRANNY	RIGHT LIBERTY	YELLOW- GREEN	BLUE- PURPLE	RED- PURPLE	AQUA- GREEN
Spectrum 4	LEFT AUTHORITY	RIGHT ANARCHY	BLUE- PURPLE	YELLOW- GREEN	AQUA- GREEN	RED- PURPLE

Disjointed Spectrum B

Disjointed Spectrum B is favored by some other people of the same color profiles: GREEN-AQUA, GREEN-YELLOW, PURPLE-BLUE and PURPLE-RED. As with Disjointed Spectrum A, each color group uses the same underlying pattern to tell a very different story about politics.

LEFT-RIGHT AXIS	TRUE LEFT	TRUE RIGHT	GOOD	EVIL	FOOLISH	INSANE
Spectrum 4	FAR LEFT	FAR RIGHT	BLUE- PURPLE	YELLOW- GREEN	AQUA- GREEN	RED- PURPLE
Spectrum 4	FAR LEFT	FAR RIGHT	YELLOW- GREEN	BLUE- PURPLE	RED- PURPLE	AQUA- GREEN
Spectrum 3	LEFT ANARCHY	RIGHT AUTHORITY	RED- PURPLE	AQUA- GREEN	YELLOW- GREEN	BLUE- PURPLE
Spectrum 3	LEFT AUTHORITY	RIGHT ANARCHY	AQUA- GREEN	RED- PURPLE	BLUE- PURPLE	YELLOW- GREEN

A Quick Tour of Political COLORS

Is this whole COLOR thing just totally arbitrary?

No.

The choice of the COLOR assignments is somewhat ad hoc, but the relationships between the COLOR groups follow a very specific and coherent logic.

I started with the RED-BLUE right-left split that's been used pretty much nationwide since about November 2000. That assigns BLUE to the political leaders on the left and RED to the leaders on the right.

PURPLE is naturally assigned to politicians or states or people who jump back and forth between sides. Bipartisanship is PURPLE because it's the compromise position between RED and BLUE. In western civilization, PURPLE has been associated with political elites since the Roman era.

So that's how the bottom three COLORs were set.

I used COLOR math to define the top three colors. In the RGB system not-BLUE is YELLOW, not-RED is AQUA and not-PURPLE is GREEN. So the people most opposed to BLUE leadership are YELLOWs. Think Gadsen Flag and gold-bugs and market capitalists. Those most opposed to RED leadership are AQUAs. Note the connection to the Age of Aquarius and think voluntary cooperatives. Those most opposed to political authority itself are GREEN. Think grassroots independence movements that can swing either left or right.

All those distinctions leave simple left and right without COLORs. I defined them the same way PURPLE was assigned. Generic right is halfway between RED and YELLOW at socially conservative ORANGE. Generic left is halfway between BLUE and AQUA at culturally progressive DENIM.

In the middle of all these conflicting hues, consisting of each but dominated by none lies a space for GRAY people. All the shades of GRAY from almost WHITE to practically BLACK lumped together in the center.

So ends this brief overview of the political COLORs of the Asplund Chart. Try not to be politically COLOR-blind.

The GREEN-Centered Full Spectrum

As I mentioned when discussing the PURPLE-centered spectrum, the art of politics consists in framing an issue so that your own position is the point where everyone else will end up in a compromise. The standard left-right framing of political conflicts implicitly empowers anyone who can reasonably claim the center.

Like the governing establishment, the liberty movement works hard to maintain a reputation as a centrist position. The image below is the COLOR Spectrum that most closely matches the way libertarians prefer to frame the left-right continuum. From left to right it goes PURPLE-BLUE, BLUE, DENIM, AQUA, GREEN, YELLOW, ORANGE, RED, RED-PURPLE. This way of framing politics privileges the GREEN liberty position and attempts to marginalize anyone with more than a hint of PURPLE as essentially totalitarian. During periods when this way of looking at politics dominates, GREEN is the logical rallying point for big-tent independence and liberation movements.