What Color Is Your Conservatism?

For those looking for trenchant analysis of free-market conservatism, the name Julio Torres may not come to mind. The comedian and former Saturday Night Live writer (responsible for bangers like “Papyrus” and “Wells for Boys”) is a gay, progressive immigrant from El Salvador who smears his cheeks with glittery makeup and wears a multicolored, forward-facing ponytail on the top of his head. He wouldn’t be mistaken for Milton Friedman.

Yet in his recent HBO Max special Color Theories, Torres brilliantly provides an autopsy of current politics while barely mentioning politics at all. As the title suggests, Torres has theories about what colors represent certain cultural movements and how those colors interact with one another.

The basic scheme involves navy blue, green, and red.

He ascribes navy blue to the concept of authority. It’s the color of police uniforms and airport signs. With people, a navy blue individual always knows what is best for you and will enforce his or her own rules on you whenever possible.

He ascribes green to free-spiritedness. Green people are willing to collaborate with others and make mutually beneficial agreements. Green orders society and makes economies run without the need for navy blue’s rules. Green individuals are self-governing.

Torres likens this to standing on a Hanoi streetcorner, waiting for a traffic light to change so he could cross. But the light never changed — in Hanoi, you are simply expected to walk into traffic, and the motorcycle riders slow down. There is order in this chaos because the drivers and walkers share the same goal: as Torres says, “to get from point A to point B without dying or killing.”

“Our whole lives we are told that if navy blue isn’t there to step in and be like ‘now you stop, now you go, now you stop, now you go,’ that we are all going to kill each other. But maybe . . . sometimes we do have our best interests at heart,” he says, calling it a “green system.”

Of course, as political philosopher Kermit the Frog noted, it’s not easy being green. The different colors cannot live in harmony, as the navy blues seek the levers of power. Soon, navy blue thwarts green’s freedom and individualism.

And this is where red comes in. Once chill, the green individual gets angry and vindictive, and begins to lash out.

Until a decade ago, the colors in this scenario were easy to identify. Navy blue was the authoritarian left. Overzealous government enthusiasts believed there was no problem so insignificant that a new law or more funding couldn’t solve it. Colleges sought to micromanage free expression, implementing speech codes that later morphed into cancel culture. Campaign finance reform, the regulation of the timing and content of political speech, became a rallying cry. So-called liberals sought to dictate how much money people were allowed to make and who should benefit from the money confiscated from those deemed too successful.

The green camp was, of course, the free-marketeers who saw value in a capitalism divorced from the greedy hand of government. They championed the innovation and creativity that ensue when individuals are left alone and allowed to reap the benefits they earn.

But that was before the great color swap of a decade ago. Suffocating rules and regulations made the green folk decide to do some navy bluing themselves. Economic nationalism became the rage, complete with higher taxes on imported goods. Law firms were threatened if they represented people suing the government. Government placed a heavy hand on both public and private universities, on television networks when talk show hosts irritated the president, and on privately owned social media companies.

The red people, meanwhile, have found a comfortable arrangement with navy blue, their former adversaries. Angry, contemptuous red just needs to support the navy blue agenda. Then red can curry favor with navy blue to earn benefits. This is crony capitalism — not a system of mutual benefit and voluntary exchange but a protection racket dressed up in the language of populism. That is, it is green gone over to navy blue.

And so here we are: two navy blue parties, both convinced they know what’s best for you, both eager to use the machinery of government to prove it. The left wants to regulate what you say; the right wants to regulate what you buy. The left wants to confiscate your earnings for approved social purposes; the right wants to confiscate them for approved industrial ones.

We used to be a people who believed in free minds and free markets, who thought individuals were capable of governing themselves without a permission slip from Washington. Traditional conservatives are still those people, and it’s not too late to bring back the green. This will undoubtedly make some people blue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OOIiJRPIcU