Ask Nathan Anything: Quarantine Edition

[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.

[Wikipedia delenda est]

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.

[Calthrina950]

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

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

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.

[Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God]

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?

[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.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

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

(The band whose video you commented that on):

[Continential]

What do you think of the online left?

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

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

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

[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.

[All Along The Watchtower]

why mainline Protestant so lame

at least Catholic have tradition and evangelical have rock music

[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.

[All Along The Watchtower]

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 the Great Sort. That in itself is all the more reason to be mainline Protestant in my opinion.

This is why you're one of my favs here.

[Alcibiades]

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.

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?

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

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

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

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

[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.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

@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?

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Now if only their inheritors would extend the same kindness to their coreligionists in Southern Europe.

How relatable!

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

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

Also I agree re: Radicals.
I don't know if you know, but in 1981 besides the abortion referendum to make law n. 194 more restrictive, there was another referendum (promoted by the Radicals) to make the law much looser. Needless to say it was voted against 89-11.

IUM was hilarious but in a bad way.

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.

Yeah, I was fully expecting the answer to be Great Britain.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

@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"

3. Basically in Italy people were already fed up with the system in the 80's, among other things because there was a public perception of there being grifters everywhere much before Mani pulite, and there were many factors coming together:
- the fall of the Berlin Wall caused a lot of soul-searching obviously inside the PCI (which still represented 25% of the electorate)
- Pentapartito was stale af
- Craxi was interested in remaking completely the political system (although he never went anywhere)
- some politicians got interested in electoral reform, but from a different perspective than Craxi, and when he and most of the ruling class came out against the 1991 referendum, they got their asses beaten by fed-up people in an unprecedented way: the triple preference vote was abolished by a 96-4 margin
- Craxi was, I think, perceived as relatively hostile to American interests
- muh demise of unions and muh neoliberal influence were right there present like everywhere else in the world
- there was an appetite for renovation and reform and rooting out mafia which developed especially in Palermo around 1985, which had repercussions because mafia had ties every-damn-where especially around the DC
- new parties tried to expolit the tiredness with the system, most notably and successfully the first Lega Nord
- President of the Republic Cossiga decided to become an "active" President and to embrace the destructivist zeitgeist around 1991
- the 1980's were I think a bad decade for political Catholicism on muh social issues I guess, from the 1981 abortion referendum to Donat-Cattin's less-than-adequate response to AIDS including as you may imagine a refusal to endorse the use of condoms (ok not that the 70's had been better)
- etc. etc.

Against this background Mani pulite happened, (Falcone and Borsellino were killed - not strictly political but those were symbolic and shocking events like few others in Italy's recent past), Berlusconi sensed an opportunity, and the rest is history.

[Boobs]

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.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

@Battista What alternative to the term "center right" best represents the Italian perception of DC? Or is it moreso a lack of ideology than a particular place on the spectrum?

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

@Battista What alternative to the term "center right" best represents the Italian perception of DC? Or is it moreso a lack of ideology than a particular place on the spectrum?

DC is the centre, both now and always, and unto the ages of ages.
In part because it was a pretty big tent. Moro might be classified as centre-left, Segni Sr. as centre-right, and so on.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

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.

Weirdly the vocalist likes to post videos on Instagram of herself singing along to what's playing in her car when driving which isn't an odd thing on Instagram of course....but it's songs from people like Kesha and Lizzo.

[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.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

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.

You might have swapped PSDI and PRI there.

Otherwise I really doubt you have much affection for PNM and PDIUM (monarchists) or DP and PdUP (tankies to the left of PCI). Maybe PSIUP (people who left PSI in 1964 and ended up in PCI in 1972)?

You would have really loved is this one: Partito Cristiano Sociale