On the initiative of the socialists, Chișinău began repairing old playgrounds. This was written on the social media page of city councillor Iuri Vitneanski:
‘In addition to the places where you need to put a new sports facility, there are old playgrounds in need of restoration. We started work on the repair of old playgrounds on Kuza-Voda Street 35, and on Kuza-Voda 25 and 26.
‘In total, as part of the programme of the Party of Socialists fraction in the Chișinău city council, by the end of year 2019 we plan to restore nearly eighty old playgrounds,’ said Iuri Vitneanski.
I’ve been saying this for a while now. The healthiest political trend I had seen in a long while, which unfortunately now seems to be reversing (or which is being actively opposed by the usual Washington Consensus suspects), has been the pink tide in Eastern Europe – a pink tide with a blue crest, as it were. In 2016 we saw socialist parties in Bulgaria, Slovakia and Moldova take power, which ran on attempts to attain to the œconomic goals we here in the United States tend to associate with democratic socialism, such as: full employment, funding for pensions and public healthcare, restoring or strengthening public sector services.
But in addition to this, they support restoring old architecture, including (as we have seen) old playgrounds and old monuments. Alien to them is the spate of statue-smashing sentiments nowadays so prevalent among the American left*. They are pro-family and pro-child – witness the attention being given to children’s public architecture in Moldova! They are pro-natalist – both the Bulgarian and the Moldovan socialist parties make reference to demographic crises and the need to bring up birthrates and curb abortion. They are also pro-faith: the Moldovan PSRM programme enshrines a special statute for the Orthodox Christian faith; and the Bulgarian BSP enjoys a close relationship with Patriarch Neofit of Bulgaria.
It is worth stressing that the Eastern European left is not nativist or ethno-chauvinist. Despite all three parties having a certain degree of scepticism about immigration and border policy, they are nonetheless supported by, and support in turn, ethnic minorities inside their own borders. Just as Direction in Slovakia is supported by the Rusins, the Moldovan PSRM is supported by an overwhelming percentage of the ethnic and linguistic minority, the Oǵuz Turkic-speaking Gagauz.
This Eastern European manifestation of socialism – democratic, paternalistic, believing, pro-child, pro-family, pro-peace and pro-classicalism – comes very close, both ideologically and æsthetically, to my own Ruskin-, Morris- and Tawney-derived Anglophile Tory socialist preferences. This should not come as a surprise; Ruskin and Morris were each deeply influenced by Orthodox Byzantine and Bulgarian artistic and literary output, respectively.
A politics, perhaps not exactly like, but analogous to this Eastern European formation, is potentially possible in the United States. There is a significant constituency for a politics which is œconomically populist and working-class oriented, but socially conservative (or at least, not ‘woke’). Unfortunately, even though we do have the masterful and redoubtable David Bentley Hart among us, we here in the United States do not have a particularly robust matrix of Orthodox Christian-derived cultural sedimentation to build on; nor do we have that particularly strong historical awareness that would support such a cohesive paternalistic-but-pluralistic alignment of political priorities. That remains to be built – a project of generations.
* Not that I am a particular fan of carpetbagger statuary commemorating the ill-behaved and ill-disciplined spoilt children of Barbadian slave traders who rose in an ill-conceived classical-liberal Confœderate revolt against the national-liberal fœderalist Union – but neither is the current wave of attacks, defacement and vandalism on public institutions and installations particularly healthy, either. A decent Slavophil distrust of statuary in general seems to be in order.
I realize that this article is almost two years old but i find it interesting that you haven’t really commented on the Sandinistas, who are probably the largest pro life socialist party in the Western Hemisphere and whose slogan is Christianity, Socialism, and Solidarity.
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