Ask Antonio (Almost) Anything

[°Leprechaun]

Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what's on the other side?

I actually don't know that many such songs.

hmmm... do you have a favorite song(s)?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what's on the other side?

I actually don't know that many such songs.

hmmm... do you have a favorite song(s)?

A very reductive list:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkfiCDv4Jbk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ2yXWi0ppw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE69GhmzI9s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3yqMr3ffY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U06jlgpMtQs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LohnbmgLSb0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k9j7TQbNlg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxTIYV861Tw

[°Leprechaun]

Losing My Religion is definitely one of my favorites, as well.

[°Leprechaun]

Do you have any opinion about religion?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Do you have any opinion about religion?

You mean, religion in general, as an abstract concept?

I'm becoming increasingly fond of it in some ways, but I don't think I'll ever be able to have faith myself.

[Kingpoleon]

Have you ever read The Screwtape Letters?

If not, I would certainly recommend it, as well as some sort of study guide to guide you through it. It is a surprisingly good book. As for similar books for Islam, I don't know. Maybe you could ask TimTurner or TheShadowyAbyss?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Have you ever read The Screwtape Letters?

If not, I would certainly recommend it, as well as some sort of study guide to guide you through it. It is a surprisingly good book. As for similar books for Islam, I don't know. Maybe you could ask TimTurner or TheShadowyAbyss?

Thanks for the recommendation! I hadn't heard of it, but I've heard a lot of good about C. S. Lewis, so I'd be happy to check it out some day.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Have you ever read The Screwtape Letters?

If not, I would certainly recommend it, as well as some sort of study guide to guide you through it. It is a surprisingly good book. As for similar books for Islam, I don't know. Maybe you could ask TimTurner or TheShadowyAbyss?

Thanks for the recommendation! I hadn't heard of it, but I've heard a lot of good about C. S. Lewis, so I'd be happy to check it out some day.

Very easy read. Also, a pretty conservative book, overall (at least with regard to the moral issues it presents). Interesting and enjoyable, I found it.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Bumping this since all the kids are doing it.

I don't think I'm going to answer with as many effortposts as I did back in the first run of this, since I'm pretty busy at the moment, but if a question deserves it, I'll make sure to give it a detailed answer as soon as I can.

[Continential]

What do you think about the future of Social Democracy in the United States?

[Gracile]

What books, publications, or other media have most helped you develop your political opinions?

[Former President tack50]

Opinion of the recient Spanish election results and outcome?

[Antonio the Sixth]

What do you think about the future of Social Democracy in the United States?

Right now it looks brighter than in most other developed countries, honestly. Not that that's saying much...

At least the US has an increasingly organized and enthusiastic political movement that's dedicated to pushing back against the neoliberal orthodoxy and setting new terms for the political debate (and finding some success in doing so). It's far from a perfect movement, God knows, but it's something to build from. The same is true for Momentum and the activism around Corbyn in the UK, even if its current incarnation is even more toxic and self-defeating. But the same can't be said of most of continental Europe, where the left still looks like a decomposing corpse at the moment.

What books, publications, or other media have most helped you develop your political opinions?

That's a wonderful question, and to do it justice I'll have to give it a bit more thought than I can at the moment. I'll try to answer this weekend.

Opinion of the recient Spanish election results and outcome?

Short answer:

PEDRO SANCHEZ, TACTICAL MASTERMIND

Long(ish) answer: Shameful behavior from all parties involved in government negotiations, and especially from Sanchez. The elections were not necessary - there existed a clear majority and it would have produced a reasonably stable government if everyone had been reasonable in their demands and accepted to give in a little. Proportional representation in a multi-party system requires parties responsible enough to deal with each other like adults, and Spanish parties have been repeatedly failing that test since 2015. It's kind of baffling how entitled the two old parties are to governing alone like they used to back when Spain had a 2-party system. They need to accept that these days are over and that proportional democracy is a whole different game.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

1) Do you have a favourite monarch from the ancien regime?

2) What are your feelings around the discourse of "identity politics"/"class reductionism" in regards to the left as a whole?  Do you prefer the French or American left's use of racial politics?

[Cassius]

What’s your view on René Rémond’s division of the French right in partes tres? I don’t know very much about French politics, but it seems a bit contrived to me, such as classing Gaullists (an extremely heterogenous group) as ‘Bonapartists’ purely on the basis of stylistic similarities between de Gaulle and Bonaparte (both being military strongmen who identified themselves with the French nation).

[Antonio the Sixth]

1) Do you have a favourite monarch from the ancien regime?

I'm going to be boring and say Henri IV. It's hard to keep in mind just how revolutionary notion it was for a state to make religious toleration its policy so early in the 17th century. Even in England, the one place where the idea really took hold, it would take another century or so for it to really become the norm. Henri IV started France on a path that could have put it way ahead of its time, if his two successors hadn't first gradually and then dramatically (and quasi-genocidally) reversed course. He also managed the economy with relative competence given the circumstance, and iirc his reign is remembered as a prosperous time. It was relatively peaceful too, after Henri IV won his civil war (although he was planning a foreign war that would have kind of prefigured the 30 Years War right before he was murdered). He wasn't a Wonderful Ruler by any means, but I don't think any French king ever really rose to that level.

There are also a lot of kings who were by no means admirable but who still deserve mentions for being fascinating characters. Philip II ("Augustus"), Philip IV ("the Iron King") and Louis XI ("the Universal Spider") have fully earned their place among history's greatest Magnificent Bastards, as their surnames imply. And Saint Louis is fascinating for how thoroughly he embodied medieval values and ideals, for better and for worse.

Francis I and Louis XIV are terribly, painfully overrated, though, unless you think building pretty palaces and commissioning good art/literature makes up for causing a series of domestic and geopolitical disasters that would haunt the country for centuries to come.

[Antonio the Sixth]

2) What are your feelings around the discourse of "identity politics"/"class reductionism" in regards to the left as a whole?  Do you prefer the French or American left's use of racial politics?

Mainly, I just wish leftists would stop screaming past each other and were able to listen to each other's perspective and try to understand where it's coming from. Not to sounds like Bronz, but there's a lot of strawmanning and knee-jerk dismissiveness on both sides. All I see coming out of these exchange is a return to the same old oppression olympics that we keep get bogged down into. It's exhausting and ultimately pointless.

As for where I stand, I don't really have a grand all-encompassing theory of the roots of oppression. As a white upper-middle class straight cis man(TM), I'm probably the last person who should have one, honestly. Reductionist claims of any kind have always struck me as silly - society is far too complex for this kind of broad language. So no, I don't believe all oppression can be reduced to class. There are plenty of wealthy Black people, women, and LGBT people who have been the victim of social injustices in this country. That being said, when push comes to shove, I guess I do think of class as more fundamental to leftist identity. If class differences were abolished in America, would racism, sexism and homophobia disappear? Probably not. But many of the levers that are currently used to enforce racism, sexism and homophobia would be gone. Keeping Black people into poverty has been primary tool used by Whites to deny Black people equal citizenship since the Civil War. Financial insecurity is what stops many women and LGBT people from leaving their abusers. And of course, the right itself has long used racism, sexism and homophobia as ways to redirect white working-class people's anger at their economic condition toward a scapegoat or other. Poverty is an open wound through which all forms of bigotry come to infect society. So yeah, I'd say class should be front and center in leftist politics, but that doesn't mean we should paper over or dismiss other forms of oppression.

I also just think that class politics (which is, itself, a form of identity politics - leftists who deny that show a fundamental lack of understanding of how politics work) is simply a more effective strategy for building a left-wing coalition. An alliance of the working-class across gender, race, etc. will be far more powerful numerically, and far more likely to effectively hold politicians accountable for enacting a bold leftist agenda, than the coalition of minorities and "woke" upper-middle class voters that characterizes the modern Democratic party. The latter will never support significantly reining in capitalism when push comes to shove, because that's not where there interests lay.

[Antonio the Sixth]

What’s your view on René Rémond’s division of the French right in partes tres? I don’t know very much about French politics, but it seems a bit contrived to me, such as classing Gaullists (an extremely heterogenous group) as ‘Bonapartists’ purely on the basis of stylistic similarities between de Gaulle and Bonaparte (both being military strongmen who identified themselves with the French nation).

Yeah, it's generally a bad idea to assume that French parties represent a clear and uniform ideological or cultural tradition. That has almost never been the case in French history (the only genuine example I can see of a major political party with a coherent ideology is the PCF). Dating back from the days of the French Revolution, politics have always revolved around loose networks of notables sharing a set of priorities and a basic political strategy, but which could easily shift around if a new situation came up. This was the basic lay of the land until the turn of the 20th century. The rise of the socialists and the formation of an actual organized Radical Party put a little more order in all this, but it was still far from the model of the British party system at that time. Things were a bit more organized during the Fourth Republic, but only so much, and the first years of the Fifth Republic was (at least initially) a step back toward a more fragmented and shifting party system. Things eventually consolidated back into the "Big Four" party system of the 1970s and 80s, but by that point, catch-all parties was the order of the day, so ideological cohesiveness wasn't the main priority anyway (and besides, RPR/UDF soon developed into.

All this lengthy premise is to say that, yes, trying to map Rémond’s typology into specific parties is by and large a fool's errand. I think they are much more productively understood as three basic tendencies that are present within the French right writ large. How well they correspond to given parties will vary a lot over time. So, in this case, Gaullism in the days of De Gaulle was about as close as you get to a Bonapartist-inflected right in this past century: built around a charismatic leader, using a unifying, inclusive form of nationalist rhetoric, and being keen on state intervention in the economic sphere. However, the gaullist movement became a very different beast soon after De Gaulle's death (especially under Chirac, who experimented with almost every right-of-center ideology under the sun). Nowadays, you can see various right-wing figures embodying each tendency to various extents. A lot of the Orléanist right has migrated into FBM's orbit, but some of them are still part of LR (mainly Valérie Pécresse at this point). The Bonapartist tendency has been kind of moribund lately since Philippe Séguin's career ended some time in the early 2000s, but I guess someone like Xavier Bertrand might be trying to take it up. The Legitimist tendency has been ascendant more or less ever since the whole debacle around SSM in 2013: that's the area both Fillon and Wauquiez catered most to. But it doesn't seem to have served them very well.