“Better dead than red!”

“Better dead than red!” is presented as an anti-Communist slogan whose political meaning shifts ironically in the United States. Because “red” designates the Republican Party and “blue” the Democratic Party in the contemporary two-party system described here, the old slogan’s color takes on an unexpected new association: populist Christian fundamentalists, despite voting Republican, adopt a form of popular mobilization that recalls the old Left.

The Slogan’s Reversal

The book’s point is not that the slogan has simply lost its original anti-Communist meaning. Rather, its familiar opposition between red and its enemies becomes newly unstable when the political groups using that opposition are compared with the social logic of the movements they resemble. The phrase acquires irony from the distance between its inherited political charge and the grass-roots stance of the contemporary populist campaigns.

That reversal belongs to a larger contrast between two ways of organizing political conflict. Antiracist and antisexist struggles, as the book characterizes them, seek recognition and the coexistence of different identities. Class struggle instead intensifies difference into antagonism, aiming to displace the opposing class from its sociopolitical role. The slogan’s new resonance comes from the claim that conservative-populist campaigns retain this antagonistic, popular-mobilization form even as the liberal Left tends to defuse antagonism into recognition of differences.

Color and Political Position

The book makes the reversal concrete through the color conventions of the United States party system: red identifies Republicans and blue identifies Democrats. Populist fundamentalists vote Republican, yet their grass-roots campaigns against upper-class exploitation are described as taking over a stance associated with the old Left. The color label and the political form therefore pull in different directions: the slogan’s “red” remains attached to its anti-Communist history, while the mobilizing logic it unexpectedly evokes crosses the conventional party alignment.

This is an irony of political form rather than a claim that the groups share the same ideology. The comparison concerns how opposition is organized—through popular mobilization against an upper class—not an identity between Christian fundamentalism and the old Left. The phrase marks that surprising continuity without erasing the ideological differences that make the comparison unsettling.

A Wider Reversal of Party Roles

The surrounding discussion extends the irony beyond the slogan. The book argues that the traditional roles of the two major parties have, in several respects, been reversed: Republican administrations spent heavily, increased the budget deficit, strengthened the federal state in practice, and pursued global interventionism, while Democrats pursued fiscal restraint and, under Clinton, eliminated the deficit. In socioeconomic policy, Democrats are described as advancing neoliberal measures such as welfare-state retrenchment, tax reductions, and privatization; Bush, by contrast, proposed legalizing the status of millions of undocumented Mexican workers and expanding access to health care for retirees.

These examples widen the slogan’s function. It is not merely a surviving relic of anti-Communist rhetoric but a compact sign of political expectations being unsettled: party identity, policy, and the social form of mobilization no longer line up neatly. The book’s irony lies in the persistence of an antagonistic grass-roots attitude under a political label historically opposed to the Left.