Ask Nathan Anything: Quarantine Edition

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

*snip*

I'm familiar-ish with Gundam Wing, which I more or less like, and (unfortunately?) with Garzey's Wing, Tomino's infamous foray into the isekai genre, which I've seen two or three times. To my eternal shame, I've allowed certain Garzey-isms to infect my everyday speech ("please do so"; "present mental condition").

Just sent you a PM asking for a pitch.

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Eff the moonmen, this is Earth, bay-bee.

I'm going to interpret this as a question and say that I think Neil Armstrong was a strong lean FF.

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What are your thoughts on the Avignon Papacy (both in its legitimate and schismatic incarnations)? Did anything good come out of it, theologically, culturally or politically, or was it the unmitigated moral and PR disaster that it's usually portrayed as?

I honestly don't know quite enough about it to say. I do know that Clement VI, the Pope during the Black Death, was an Avignon Pope, and from what I know he handled the plague about as well as any continent-wide leader could have and made an effort to stop the worst of the social reactions to it (such as the various pogroms). Characteristically for an Avignon Pope, he was also wildly corrupt and appointed dozens of members of his extended family to high Church positions, in addition to being hackishly pro-French even by Avignon Pope standards. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were other Avignon Popes too who, while staggeringly corrupt, were also on some level public-spirited and even devout.

Bumping this to give a shout-out to Avignon Pope John XXII, a decidedly mixed bag who persecuted the Franciscan "Spirituals" and is one of very few popes known to have held views (on the nature of the afterlife) that were later determined to be heretical...but he also canonized Aquinas, attempted (by the standards of the day) to exist on good terms with the Islamic world, and is traditionally credited with composing the "Anima Christi", a prayer about the Eucharist that people still say today.

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I'm back on the forum and just as vain as ever, so why not bump this?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I would still like a response to this post in greater depth:

I'm left with the wistful "if only" feeling that it would have been nice if someone as awful as Lipinski had lost over something other than not being a loyal footsoldier on abortion.

That's a pretty big oversimplification. For one, Lipinski was hit just as much for voting against Obamacare as he was being anti-choice. He had a ton of liabilities that Newman easily played to her advantage.

As someone from the area (ignore my memeish MA avatar), I can tell you that your assertion was not correct.

I misunderstood the dynamics of that race due to a bias in favor of pro-life Democrats, plain and simple. You were right and I was wrong.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

So... I have more than some questions.

How long have you been a Catholic?

Baptized for social reasons as a baby, raised generically Christian and mostly going to mainline Protestant churches, drifted into the Catholic Church via the Episcopal Church in early adulthood. I was confirmed three and a half years ago--during my last semester in a master's program at a Protestant school of theology!

Your thoughts on contraception?

I accept Humanae vitae, but I definitely wouldn't say I'm enthusiastic about it.

Describe a political compromise on abortion you would be willing to take.

At this point, I would actually prefer a political compromise on abortion to any morally consequent series of abortion policies. I definitely don't want abortion to be more proliferated (and especially not more socially acceptable) than it is now, but I'm also not exactly chomping at the bit for the Central Americanization of US abortion policy that various state-level GOPs seem newly committed to. I'd be comfortable with a situation like Italy's where abortion is more or less freely available early in pregnancy but conscientious objection to it is widespread and widely accepted, if such a situation would successfully render The Abortion Issue a third rail and allow the American body politic to move on to new topics.

If I recall correctly you mentioned a grandmother Pasqualina and an uncle Ciro in another thread some days ago, so I'll assume you are Italian American. Did your ancestors come from Naples? Have you ever been to Italy?

Yes, several of my great-grandparents came from Naples and from small towns in the Campanian hinterlands. Others were Eastern European Jews or lace-curtain Baltimore Irish. I identify primarily as Italian-American and secondarily as an assimilated Jew--the Jewish identity would probably be the more salient of the two if I weren't a practicing Christian, especially since I have a Jewish last name. I've been to Italy twice: first on an extended hiking and sightseeing trip through Umbria, Lazio, and Campania a couple of years ago, second on a day trip to the Val d'Aosta during a vacation last winter the rest of which was spent in France. I love the landscapes, the art, the food, and most of the people--it's one of two countries I can see myself returning to again and again throughout my life, along with Japan.

Your favourite Pope of the 20th or 21st century?

John Paul I, whom I like for the tragicomic aura that his very brief, very what-could-have-been papacy gives off. I feel obliged to rep Paul VI as well since I actually attended his canonization during the first of the two trips to Italy mentioned above, but I have a mixed view of his actual record as Pope. (Love the way he implemented most of the Vatican II documents, hate the way the clerical abuse phenomenon seems to have reached its apex on his watch.)

Are you knowledgeable about Italian literature?

Not as much as I'd like to be, but I've read most of Umberto Eco's novels, as well as the Commedia and Vita nuova, various early Franciscan writings, and much of Umberto Saba's poetry. Next on my docket are Giambattista Basile and maybe Alberto Moravia. I wish Grazia Deledda's work was readily available in translation.

For future reference, my bachelor's degree is in Japanese literature, so that's the literature I'm most familiar with.

Where did you take your display name "The scissors of false economy" from?

It's a reference to a local Western Massachusetts issue. The worst COVID outbreak at any long-term care facility in the United States (so far) happened at a veterans' center called the Holyoke Soldiers' Home that had had its budget cut under both Charlie Baker and his awful corporate Democrat predecessor Deval Patrick. Over 100 of the veterans living there--veterans of WWII, Korea, Vietnam, men (and a few women) whom the US allegedly sees as its greatest heroes--died, and many more are still deathly ill. The scope of the human tragedy, and of the moral idiocy from policymakers that caused it, are without precedent in recent Western Mass history, and are especially galling given that when the HSH first opened in 1952 then-Governor Paul Dever specifically promised that "the scissors of false economy will never be used to cut the appropriations needed for the maintenance of this outstanding institution erected for the veterans of Massachusetts". Turns out the scissors of false economy were used for just that after all.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How are you doing?

Stressed as hell from a new job. One of my supervisors consistently refers to children (the job is in a school system) as "kiddos" and it's driving me nuts; in my private notes I wrote "Beatrix Kiddo, Kill Bill. Uma Thurman knew?" She also speaks to adults in a tone of voice that even kiddos tend to find infuriating, and she refers to the Spanish language as a "dialect". On the plus side, I like all my other colleagues and I'm going to be able to make my paychecks go a long way since I'm living with family for at least the next eight or nine months and thus won't have to worry about making rent till next summer. I'm going to sock a few hundred dollars each month into my savings account and hopefully have enough by next May or June to establish myself in a decent post-pandemic living situation.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

So... I have more than some questions.

[...]

Rewriting as I forgot one question and also you may have missed this.

Funnily I was originally going to craft my third question above as "would you accept a situation like Italy's as a compromise on abortion?"

Since you mentioned John Paul I, have you ever read Illustrissimi?

Parts of it. There was a beautiful early hardcover edition of it (credited to Albino Luciani rather than to Pope John Paul I, so it was put out during his lifetime) in a used bookstore in a town in New Jersey where I used to live, but I moved away from that town before my serious interest in Catholic theology developed and I haven't been able to find another good copy of it.

And, which of these would you apply the adjective "fascist" to?
Franco's Spain; Metaxas's Greece; Salazar's Portugal; Pinochet's Chile; Hirohito's Japan around WW2.

Franco's Spain was clearly fascist until the early 1950s or so; most serious attempts that I've seen to finesse a difference between Falangism and fascism are ideologically motivated and are usually part of a broader project of justifying or even advocating clerical authoritarianism. Metaxas's Greece was fascist. Imperial Japan was not fascist but only because it did not present itself as a break from the traditional Japanese hard right (i.e. did not make revolutionary claims) and lacked a compelling mass-mobilizing Party (nobody felt the fanatical loyalty towards the Imperial Rule Assistance Association that people felt towards the PNF or NSDAP). I don't know enough about the Estado Novo to say for sure, but my instinct is that it was right-wing authoritarian but not quite fascist. Pinochet's Chile was not fascist, but was still an irredeemably evil system on its own merits.

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What are your favorite haunts in the Berkshires?

Greylock, a few stores in Adams where I know the proprietor, various restaurants in North Adams and Williamstown, some of the scenic lookouts going east on Route 2 towards Franklin County. As you can tell, I'm more of a North Berkshires guy than a South Berkshires one. The only South Berkshires town I'm really familiar with is Great Barrington, a community I dislike. I'd like to check out Stockbridge sometime but I haven't gotten around to it.

Here is one of mine:

Oh, lovely! Where is it? It looks like maybe Lanesborough or thereabouts?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

So... I have more than some questions.

[...]

Rewriting as I forgot one question and also you may have missed this.

Funnily I was originally going to craft my third question above as "would you accept a situation like Italy's as a compromise on abortion?"

Since you mentioned John Paul I, have you ever read Illustrissimi?

Parts of it. There was a beautiful early hardcover edition of it (credited to Albino Luciani rather than to Pope John Paul I, so it was put out during his lifetime) in a used bookstore in a town in New Jersey where I used to live, but I moved away from that town before my serious interest in Catholic theology developed and I haven't been able to find another good copy of it.

And, which of these would you apply the adjective "fascist" to?
Franco's Spain; Metaxas's Greece; Salazar's Portugal; Pinochet's Chile; Hirohito's Japan around WW2.

Franco's Spain was clearly fascist until the early 1950s or so; most serious attempts that I've seen to finesse a difference between Falangism and fascism are ideologically motivated and are usually part of a broader project of justifying or even advocating clerical authoritarianism. Metaxas's Greece was fascist. Imperial Japan was not fascist but only because it did not present itself as a break from the traditional Japanese hard right (i.e. did not make revolutionary claims) and lacked a compelling mass-mobilizing Party (nobody felt the fanatical loyalty towards the Imperial Rule Assistance Association that people felt towards the PNF or NSDAP). I don't know enough about the Estado Novo to say for sure, but my instinct is that it was right-wing authoritarian but not quite fascist. Pinochet's Chile was not fascist, but was still an irredeemably evil system on its own merits.

I'd like to elaborate on my assessment of Pinochet's Chile a bit more.

While I (and all right-thinking students of politics and of history) entirely reject the assertion that fascism is/was somehow left-wing or even "extreme upper-center" just because it involves state direction of the economy, I do think that fascism by definition implies a regimented economy as part of a regimented society. For that reason I don't think the various free-market fundamentalist Latin American strongmen, either historical ones like Pinochet or current ones like Bolsonaro and Áñez, are fascist. A genuinely fascist Latin American regime would look more like Perón or Vargas at their respective worst, or even some of Mexico's more heavy-handed "perfect dictatorship"-era Presidents. It might genuinely not look right-wing at all to observers used to the Anglo-American or Western European political spectrum.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

As a Catholic, do you believe that premarital sex is immoral?

As a Protestant, do you believe that Marian devotion is a bunch of nonsense? Because my sister is convinced it is.

Is your sister straight? I think there's an element of psychosexual sublimation to a lot of Marian devotion that people who aren't attracted to women sometimes have a harder time seeing the point of. Everyone I know with a really intense Marian devotion is either a straight or bisexual man or a lesbian or bisexual woman.

Not your AMA, but might this be a way that certain folks who don't really know their own sexuality, or deny it, find a way of expressing themselves?

And is this all (both your post and mine) a way of saying that it's similar to the Winona Ryder fandom?

Answering this here so as not to derail Battista Minola's AMA.

I think Marian devotion can absolutely be a way for lesbian and bisexual Catholic women to avoid confronting certain things about themselves. In my experience there are also plenty of out gay women who just straight-up admit that they have a quasi-erotic relationship with her (I know one woman, a lapsed Brazilian Catholic, who openly admits she'd go down on Mary if she could), but I know a wildly disproportionate number of lesbian Catholics in general so my experiences are not universal. There's also Victorian poetry, some of it by women, that has--in my opinion--uncomfortably yonic imagery of the wounds of Christ. ("Once, twice, and thrice—as I crept close/Into the ark, the nest, the bride,/Into the pulse, into the life, into the wounded side/Sealed with the love‐kiss,/By His own inner token His;/So, in the night I rose; not I,/Where is there any longer one, Christine,/Of the dim years floated by,/One you held lovingly,/One of the happy twain?"--Eliza Keary.) But this is less common than the Marian stuff.

The gay male equivalent is of course a devotion to the wounds of Christ and/or St. Sebastian. Keary is remarkable partly for being a possibly-gay woman who used an especially graphic form of the usually gay male "penetrating the wounds of Christ" motif.

Second question: Yes, I know tons of people who want to sleep with Winona Ryder but won't admit it.

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How do you feel about same-sex marriage as a Catholic?

I'm strongly in favor of it for all the purposes modern, value-pluralist societies have legal marriage for, as the one unorthodoxy-on-a-sex-issue I allow myself. I don't think the Church is obliged to be willing to solemnize same-sex marriages itself, though.

Your favourite saint?

Our Lady, Oscar Romero (although I think the Catholic left has a tendency to stylize and over-idealize him; he died for and with the poor but he wasn't actually an untouchable paragon of all personal and political virtues while he was alive, even after his late-in-life conversion experience), Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, Edith Stein, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, various Welsh and Anglo-Saxon saints, various Japanese and Chinese martyrs.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How does your personal experience inform your analysis of class in America? Is there anything in particular you think the American left is getting seriously wrong about it? And what do you think of the new brand of conservative class analysis that seems to be developing around, say, Michael Lind?

I joke that I'm a literal champagne socialist and massive HP, and currently that's true, but my family is well-off now essentially due to sheer dumb luck--my mom remarrying the right person, the right family member of that person dying and leaving him a bunch of stock options, our previous house abruptly appreciating while we were living there, etc. When I was a kid we really struggled to get by. I used to think I had a restricted diet as a kid for reasons related to my autism, but I recently learned from a friend of mine who just had a baby that the things I ate as a kid--carrots, applesauce, Cheerios, and yogurt, mostly--have a lot of overlap with the things you can feed a child on WIC or SNAP that'll keep them healthy but don't require a ton of meal prep. And before I was born my mom had plenty of struggles of her own as the first member of a working-class family to go to college.

So, having seen both the "upstairs" and the "downstairs" of American society, and being a member of a family unit that finally "made it" over the course of my adolescence, what have I learned about class in America?

1. As I said above, one "makes it" in America by sheer lucky breaks at best. At worst, one has to do all the terrible things to people doing which we associate with people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. I had a little lightbulb moment a few months ago when I realized that, even though the left talks up the injustice of inherited privilege a lot, on an individual level probably the least morally evil way to make a whole boatload of money is to inherit it. So one thing I think the American left gets wrong about poverty and wealth is the fixation on things like levying inheritance taxes when in fact people who get rich by "hard work" are generally doing things way worse than just waiting for Great-Aunt Gladys to keel over. In other words, the hard-work mythology of American life makes it incredibly difficult to criticize "self-made men" for being rich, but precisely because it's difficult, it's imperative that we find some way of convincingly doing so.
2. The rich aren't automatically bad people necessarily, but if you're a rich person only interacting with other rich people, your compassion resources deplete pretty rapidly. To put it Atlas Forum-ly, the most horrifying thing jaichind said about himself in That One Thread isn't that he'd invest in sex trafficking if he could get away with it, it's that his entire social circle is made up of people as rich as he is. The "slightly rich" (i.e. upper-middle and lower-upper class--doctors and lawyers up to people who inherited a bunch of blue chip investments like my stepfather did) in America by and large just don't associate with people who challenge our comforts or our sense of entitlement and deservingness. The "very rich" often deliberately avoid doing so. People say this a lot about race but it's true of class too. I'm going to put this in italics because it's something a lot of people both IRL and on Talk Elections blog seem to not understand about my beliefs: It's a lot harder to believe in class collaboration as an avenue to a just society once you realize that by and large it's the rich who are just not interested in collaborating.
3. For a well-off person to accept the status quo on poverty and wealth in this country is an act of cruelty, and almost any alternative to that acceptance is at least slightly preferable.

I've only read a few of Michael Lind's pieces (they're mostly in AmCon, right?) but so far I really like what I've read by him. I've always been in favor of the sort of leftist-socon cobelligerence* that the rise of the MAGA movement rendered a pipe dream. Part of what's so pernicious about thinkers like Foucault, Butler, and their many and various sex-obsessed intellectual progeny is that the acceptance of their priorities on the left has reduced the intellectual and moral case for leftism to a chain of interlocking special pleadings. Your typical Very Intelligent leftist today may hate the rich, but certainly doesn't love the poor.

*I'm using this word instead of alliance because I don't think that either leftists or socons should be obliged to just subordinate their specifically-leftist or specifically-socon concerns to the cause of an amoral #populism like certain Trump enablers on the left like to suggest.

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Do you have any thoughts on Queen Christina of Sweden, daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, who was forced to abdicate after converting to Catholicism? Famous for her intelligence and philosophical discussions with Descartes, as well as her possible lesbianism.

As Luis Tiant would not actually say, Queen Christina of Sweden been very very good to me. I like Weird Catholic History and I like LGBT history; what's not to love? It takes a special kind of moxie to be a probably-lesbian initially-Protestant monarch who ends up being one of only three women entombed in St. Peter's Basilica. You have to respect the hustle. When I visited Rome a couple of years ago and went to the basilica, I ran across her funerary monument (towards the right-hand side of the nave, facing the altar from the doors; i.e. the "liturgical south") without even looking for it. Figures.

Who did you vote for in the 2018 gubernatorial election? I'm assuming you didn't vote for Charlie Baker.

I voted for Bob Massie in the primary and Jay Gonzalez in the general. I wasn't crazy about Massie--he has some of the mildly creepy "population politics" associations that environmentalists who came up in the 70s and 80s often do, or at least he used to--but he was a solid leftist and I actually know people who know him. I was so unenthusiastic about Gonzalez's godawful Devalcrat "credentials" that I wasn't going to vote in the general at all, but I ended up voting against Baker after he said and did some things during the campaign that revealed a callous attitude towards the parts of Massachusetts outside the 495 beltway.

And do you think there is any merit to the recent claims that Ed Markey is going to lose the votes of disaffected Kennedy supporters in the general election?

I do not. I actually hadn't heard anybody claiming that until you did just now, and I just don't think the primary campaign was negative enough that that would be a concern. Even if I'm wrong, which I might be, and he does slough off, say, 100,000 Camelot-worshiping genepool Irish and Portuguese conservadems in Plymouth and Bristol Counties, he'll still win easily; I'm not necessarily in the love with the fact that the parts of the state Markey won in the primary are the same parts a Massachusetts Democrat these days is liable to clean up in in the general, but it's the truth.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

As a Masshole (albeit a rural one and not a city dweller), do you agree with Boston's reputation as a hotbed of often-overlooked racism?

I absolutely agree that Boston is a racist city. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be now that the city proper is majority-minority anyway, but it's definitely still present; worse, the traditional "Southie" WWC racism has been compounded by supercilious PMC "I don't hate black people but I'm still afraid of their neighborhoods" racism, and they now feed on and reinforce each other. So I wouldn't say it's the hands-down most racist major city outside the South anymore like it used to have a reputation for being (George Wallace carried Boston in Democratic Presidential primaries not once but twice!), but it's definitely still a racist place.

In general Boston also just isn't a very "fun" city to live in if you're not interested in any of a few specific things (Colonial- and Federal-era history, art museums, old "ethnic" neighborhoods, the Red Sox, and Catholicism, mostly). People go to bed surprisingly early there. I happen to be interested in most of those things so I was able to find things to do while I lived there between 2015 and 2017, but I had friends with other interests who were bored out of their skulls.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The way you described Boston in the last paragraph makes me think that those friends of yours would find Italy the most boring place on earth lol

One of them has been to Italy and was in fact bored. No, I don't get it either.

Massachusetts cities/towns (population <90,000) you would really suggest to visit?

Under ninety thousand still leaves us with a lot of good options.

1. Northampton, Hampshire County. Population 25,000ish. Hometown and political base of Calvin Coolidge. Home of Smith College, a legendary (in some circles) women's college that was the site of WAC officer training during World War II; partly because of Smith, has a huge LGBT and especially lesbian community, but is well worth visiting for non-gay reasons as well. Has a lovely downtown shopping district and several excellent small-to-medium-sized live music venues; I saw Tosca at one of them several years back.
2. Greenfield, Franklin County. Population 17,000ish. This is my hometown! Humorist John Hodgman describes the town well here.
3. Salem, Essex County. Population 40,000ish. Woo Central. This town might not be too interesting if one is not interested in witches or the paranormal or whatever, but if one is, it's an absolutely bonkers place and well worth a visit.
4. Brookline, Norfolk County. Population 60,000ish. This is an inner Boston suburb that's basically Boston without the full Boston-ness. It's incredibly bougie, though, so some of the people one meets there are supercilious assholes.
5. Yarmouth, Barnstable County. Population 25,000ish. This is your typical Cape Cod town, formerly remote but now mostly residential and full of "washashores" (people who didn't grow up on the Cape but have come to live there year-round). I'm more familiar with it than other Cape Cod towns that fit that description because it's where my aunts live. There's more to see and do than you'd think; author and illustrator Edward Gorey lived there and his house is open to the public, as is a mid-nineteenth century sea captain's house right across the road from it. There's at least one excellent used bookstore as well, and in nearby Dennis there's an antiques emporium and a seasonal restaurant called Captain Frosty's that specializes in "frappes" (Eastern Mass for milkshakes) and seafood fried within an inch of its edibility. Yum!

What do you think of the online left?

I'm agin' it. There are some individual online-left people like Liz Bruenig and a few of the Current Affairs people whom I like, but all in all, explicitly leftist online spaces are toxic and narrow-minded for all sorts of reasons and their influence on the non-online left has been almost uniformly deleterious.

BRTD, I'll listen to the songs in yours once I'm off work for the day.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

why mainline Protestant so lame

at least Catholic have tradition and evangelical have rock music

Mainline Protestantism isn't lame at all, it's just not Red Tribe or Blue Tribe enough to fare well in the Great Sort. That in itself is all the more reason to be mainline Protestant in my opinion.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Since you said Katy Perry's music is really bad do you prefer music or Sharptooth?

Sharptooth is way better, although it's still not exactly my favorite.

The one time I went to Boston, I found it a very pleasant city, with a great ‘European’ ambience, refreshingly different from the typical North American downtown.

I feel the same way about it. The ways in which it's "boring" mostly have to do with things like so-called "nightlife" that the friends I mentioned were interested in but I really am not. (My one time trying to experience Boston nightlife was a complete disaster; I ended up at a bougie bowling alley, something I wouldn't even have thought possible.)

That was more of a general comment you can feel free to respond to, and as for an actual question, what is your opinion of the German-speaking (and I guess Low Countries is fairly similar) Catholic political tradition?

I have mixed feelings on it. In particular I think its antifascist credentials are a bit overstated considering the German Catholic hierarchy's ambivalent relationship with the Nazi regime and the postwar CDU's lack of interest in continuing state-directed denazification. (I know the CDU isn't solely Catholic, but even so.) On the other hand, it can't be denied that the midcentury CDU succeeded in making West Germany a prosperous country with a mostly open society through means that were mostly consistent with Catholic social teaching. Now if only their inheritors would extend the same kindness to their coreligionists in Southern Europe.

- Inspired by Alcibiades's question, what is your opinion of the Democrazia Cristiana?
(also of other "First Republic" Italian political parties, if you want)

DC: Hilarious Party. Patronage- and graft-riddled megadisaster, but I do appreciate that it contained a sizeable Christian left faction and that it mostly cultivated alliances with parties to its left rather than parties to its right.
PCI: I'm fascinated by figures like Berlinguer, and of course I'm aesthetically very enamored of the old Red Regions political tradition, but as a party I'm not really sure what to make of it. My impression is that, for most of its existence, it absolutely would have aligned Italy fully with the Eastern Bloc if by some miracle it had won a general election.
PSI: I think fairly well of this party until the mid-to-late 70s or so but not thereafter.
PSDI: lol
PLI: lol
PRI: Relative freedom party.
Radicals: Eeehhhh. I know Antonio for one thinks quite highly of this party's legacy but I just don't have an S score that's negative enough to shake off my impression of them as turbocharged lolbertarians. I probably would have voted for the Radical position on the divorce referendum and the life imprisonment referendum, though.
MSI: DIE THE DEATH! SENTENCE TO DEATH! GREAT EQUALIZER IS THE DEATH! (horrible party)
Italian Unionist Movement: MAJOR FREEDOM PARTY, CONGRATS HILLGOOSE

- It seems like Japan and Italy are the two foreign countries you are the most interested to. What country is in third place?

Britain. I'm fascinated by it as, obviously, an extremely close political and cultural ally of the US with a culture that's so similar and yet so different. I'm also a fan of a lot of British literature and media, and it's probably the country whose history I'm most familiar with besides the US.

- I have already asked you about your favourite saints, so I will now ask you: your least favourite saints?

Far and away my least favorite saint is Bernardino of Siena, about whom the only real good that I can say is that he was centuries ahead of the curve on recognizing sexual abuse within marriage. In almost every other way I think he was dreadful.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

PSDI lol and PLI lol but PRI not lol why?
PRI was insipid as hell and tbh it should probably have dissolved in 1946.

I was writing up the post in a hurry and confused PRI with some other party; unfortunately; I forget now which one.

@Nathan @Battista Not a question and sorry to interject, but beyond both having been in the Axis powers, the situation of Japan and Italy after WWII seems fairly analogous. Both were dominated by center-right parties, creating essentially what are called "single party dominant" party systems, backed up by (the perception of?) American intelligence operations and the (exaggerated?) specter of American military invention.

So I guess I can turn this into a question that Battista Minola is also free to address:

(a) How do we differentiate between these two systems from the late 1940s/early 1950s to the 1990s, given their superficial similarities?
(b) What factors allowed for Japan to maintain this party system after the Cold War while Italy's self-destructed?

I can't really answer about the Japan part but I'll try to answer the Italy part.

1. DC has never been considered a centre-right party in Italy lol it's always foreigners who say that (although I perfectly understand why they argue so)

2. You can probably remove "the perception of" although I would leave "exaggerated"

This is funny because in Japan I'd argue it was exactly the other way around! I don't know that US intelligence was nearly as active in Japan as many on the left both in Japan and in the Japanese-American community accused it of being, but the aboveboard, plain old US military was (and is) absolutely a major presence in Japanese life and very well might have gone active on Japanese soil if (as with Italy, by some miracle) a JSP government had gotten elected at some point after the Occupation ended. (During the Occupation Japan actually did have a short-lived Socialist government under Katayama Tetsu, which introduced unemployment insurance and some modicum of paid maternity leave among other things, but it relied on support from parties that later became the centrist factions of the early LDP.)

The calculus for US policy in East Asia has changed massively in the past thirty and even in the past ten years, of course, which I think is an underrated factor in Japan's gradual remilitarization. Obama and Trump have both tacitly supported gradually more hawkish policy coming from the Japanese, which I think no previous postwar President really would have other than maybe Reagan. There was extensive Japanese logistical support during the early stages of the war on terror but Dubya was mostly content to keep it logistical.

As to why the LDP has survived and bounced back again and again whereas Italy's First Republic parties all went the way of the dinosaurs...I think the LDP's strengths were less tied to the Cold War mindset to begin with than DC's were. If you go back and look at LDP campaigning from the late 50s through the late 80s, there's some red-baiting and philoamericanism, but there's much more localism, developmentalism, homegrown Japanese nationalism, etc., ideologies and rhetorical strategies that had much more staying power than "in the privacy of the polling booth, God sees you and Stalin doesn't". I think it also helped that the LDP couldn't and can't really be outflanked to the right due to containing hard-right as well as centrist and center-right elements, even though the moderates had their hands on the steering wheel until at least the Suzuki and especially Nakasone periods. Even today, opposition forces like Koike in Tokyo and the various incarnations of the Hashimoto ideology in Kansai don't really come across as "to the right of" the LDP despite being both hawkish and neoliberal themselves.

But, in a larger sense, the LDP's perennial dominance and the seeming impossibility of permanently dislodging it from the driver's seat of Japanese politics is one of history's mysteries. There are plenty of explanations to be had for it, but it's still well worth asking why it's so much more successful at what it does than other parties--including, yes, DC--that adopted the same formula. The Japanese center-right-to-right has cracked the code. Go figure.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

My inclusion of the phrase "intelligence operations" in the case of Japan was at least partly motivated by this tiny blurb:

Ishibashi stated that the government should endeavor to set up diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and his policy was popular among the people. Unfortunately he became sick and gave up his office only two months later.

For class last year we had a reading on Japan's relationship with the US (in trade terms) during the post-war era. Ishibashi had apparently also discussed looking to the Soviet Union as a potential partner, and Ishibashi's sudden illness in this context seemed rather suspicious. Whether real or imagined, I was surprised to find no mention was made in his Wikipedia article of potential CIA involvement in his illness. My (China-born) political economy prof implied as much, but said society was pretty closed then, so such might have just been kept quiet. Can you comment?

I'm not super familiar with Ishibashi, but my impression is that CIA involvement is one possibility there among others, such as being forced out by Japan's own deep state, nudged out the door by other elements within the LDP, genuinely being sick, etc. Mainly why I'm saying US intelligence involvement in Japan is relatively unlikely (or at least unproven) is that, again, the plain old US Army and US Navy were right there and, at that point, still could have done more or less whatever they felt like in/to Japan if Ishibashi had stayed on.

Personally, my favorite conspiracy theory of this nature to do with Japan is that the relatively-liberal Emperor Taishō's mental and physical decrepitude, culminating in his death before the age of fifty, was caused by poisoning from elements of the IJA and IJN who wanted Hirohito on the throne as a puppet of the military brass. I don't fully subscribe to it, but I think it has more explanatory power than a lot of other hypotheses for what Taishō's problem was.

If you had to move to a Dixie state, which would it be? What city would you envision living in. Gonna rule right now that you can't choose Asheville.

Defining Dixie as the South as a whole, I'd move to Dallas/Fort Worth--not because I think it seems like a nice place (I don't) but because, as they used to say, I have people there. Defining Dixie as the arc of states from North Carolina down to Louisiana and Arkansas, I'd move to Charleston; the Ben Tillmans and Lindsey Grahams of the world aside, the South Carolinians I've known personally have been uniformly wonderful people, which I can't say for people I've known from certain other Southern states.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

In light of your various takes around this topic and especially the one in response to my first post in this thread, I very much would like to know your answer to this:

How would you have voted at the 1981 abortion referendum in Italy (the restrictive proposal)?

I don't know. I think it would depend on whether I was a Red Catholic DC voter or a cattocomunista PCI voter, which in turn might depend on something as contingent as what part of Italy I lived in. So Umbrian Nathan and Neapolitan Nathan definitely both vote against the Radical proposal, but might very well diverge on the Catholic proposal.

2020 Massachusetts Nathan transported back in time and given Italian citizenship somehow probably votes No on all the 1981 referenda except maybe the life imprisonment one.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

opinion of Sufism?

Fascinating movement. If not read, read The Conference of the Birds; it's a wonderful work.

Choose: Moro or Berlinguer

Toss-up/Tilt Moro, although I view both men favorably. It's not inconceivable that Moro gets canonized as a martyr some day, which would certainly be interesting to see.

Also, opinion of me using Enrico Berlinguer as my Atlasia persona?

Freedom use of Enrico Berlinguer as your Atlasia persona!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Choose: Moro or Berlinguer

Toss-up/Tilt Moro, although I view both men favorably. It's not inconceivable that Moro gets canonized as a martyr some day, which would certainly be interesting to see.

I'm all for Moro getting canonized as a martyr!

I even planned to use "Modern Martyr Aldo Moro" as my display name some day (yes, I plan display names in advance).

I like the alliteration. Very Anglo-Saxon, ironically.

PR, I forgot to suggest Rabia al-Basri as another Sufi or proto-Sufi figure to look into.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Have you ever been to the UK? If so, where did you go and how did you find it, and if not, where you like to visit?

I was actually in the UK a year ago tomorrow! Unfortunately, it was just a three-hour layover at Heathrow. I used the interfaith prayer room they have there (it was me, a little old lady who screamed "C of E dead-ender", and a bunch of Muslim guys doing maghrib; how British!), had a light dinner at the Fortnum & Mason wine bar, and was charmed by the fact that a 50p coin I got back had Peter Rabbit on it. That's the extent of my UK experience so far, but I've been wanting to do a more substantial trip some day since I was a teenager, ideally focusing on the North of England landscapes one reads about in the Brontës, Herriot, and Susanna Clarke.

Also, sticking on the British theme, what are your thoughts on Evelyn Waugh (one of my favourite writers, not least because he was a comedic genius)?

Oh, I love Waugh. My favorite funny moments in his writing are actually the bits of comic relief in the "serious" postwar works like Brideshead and Sword of Honour, but I've read and enjoyed some of the early-period comedies too. I especially like how Scoop, probably intended to be straightforwardly racist when written, has aged into a crosses-the-line-twice parody of old-timey British attitudes towards the "dark continent".

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Conciliarism or ultramontanism?

Ultramontanism is closer to the orthodox position that was eventually arrived at, but conciliarism appeals to my personal sensibilities more. Toss-up/tilt ultramontanism, but I'm very interested in the synthesis that Pope Francis seems to be attempting with his "synodality" focus.

Was the Council of Trent good or bad for the Catholic Church?

Awful. Unnecessary standardization is the perpetual bugbear of...just about every human institution, religion not least of all. Trent also inaugurated the modern system of seminary education, and I don't think anybody needs a lesson on why that was a bad thing.
 

Thoughts on Quietism?

Molinos as an individual was an HP, and a forerunner of more recent abusive "spiritual geniuses" like Sasaki Jōshū, Shlomo Carlebach, and Jean Vanier, but I've never quite understood what was so wrong with his ideas.

Is The Name of the Rose actually overrated and all the other novels by Eco underrated, as he used to proclaim in his life?

No to the first part of the question, yes to the second. Baudolino and Numero Zero in particular are underappreciated, even under-read.

Antonio, I'll get to your question in a bit.