Donald Trump’s administration is planning to spend $4 million to bolster right-wing media in Europe, part of a package of at least $25 million for civil society groups working on conservative causes in the region, according to four people familiar with the funding.
The grants risk deepening tensions between the Trump administration and European governments, some of which have already accused Washington of interfering in their domestic politics.
The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) says the funding is meant to strengthen transatlantic ties and promote free speech. It comes as European countries prepare for elections over the next couple of years, and as the Trump administration openly backs Europe’s populist right-wing and far-right parties.
I mean, yeah, it’s a relative comparison. Calling one country richer, more democratic or more authoritarian than another is “semantic” in the same sense. It doesn’t make those comparisons meaningless.
Semantics aren’t the same as making relative comparisons. I’m saying you have to kind of torture our understandings of what makes something more or less “left” to a degree that is more destructive to our understanding than constructive to say that Europe is “more left” than the US.
I don’t think you have to torture the definition at all. If one society has substantially more redistribution, public provision, organised labour and constraints on capital than another, describing it as relatively further left is a perfectly ordinary and useful comparison. It’s perfectly reasonable to argue that Europe doesn’t go nearly far enough, or to be dissatisfied with its current trajectory, and id fully agree with you, but that doesn’t invalidate the comparison.
Europe does not have greater constraints on capital, or even more organized labor. You keep erasing imperialism from how these countries function, pretending that domestic and international policy is separate rather than deeply interrelated. The German working classes, for example, enjoy what they do enjoy because the system depends on the expropriation of wealth from the global south, workers in the global south that prop up Germany do not have any say whatsoever in how Germany is run nor do they get any of the spoils. This is my central point, it’s like saying a country with greater rights for landlords is more left than one without it.
European workers generally have stronger unions, labour protections, welfare provision and constraints on capital than American workers. Strong enough? Often no, but stronger? Certainly.
You’re still just arguing that those differences don’t count because they exist within an imperial capitalist system. That’s a valid Marxist critique, but it doesn’t make the differences disappear.
Explaining why those differences exist is a separate question from whether they exist. Can you see that?
Again, you are divorcing the necessary system of imperialism from the structures that imperialism supports. An accurate look at the German system requires investigating German neocolonies and multinational corporations, finance capital, etc. The German working classes are not actually in control in Germany, the concessions they have are thus eroding. The system isn’t “more left.” My point is that the differences that exist between European countries and the US are not such that they can actually be compared in terms of left and right, such a spectrum analysis does not accurately reflect reality despite attempting to increase the nuance. False nuance is obfuscation.
I understand your argument. I just don’t accept that being capitalist and imperialist makes left-right comparisons within capitalism meaningless. If two capitalist societies differ substantially in redistribution, labour power, public ownership and market regulation, those differences can still be compared politically. Your framework choosing not to recognise them as left-right differences is seemingly arbitrary, and doesn’t make the comparison incoherent.
My issue with your framing is that you erase the real nature of imperialist economies by pretending imperialism is separate from how the domestic economy functions. At this point, you’re treating left and right as arbitrary, and not as functional, useful descriptors for systems.
But I’m not separating them. I’m saying that even accounting for imperialism, meaningful political differences still exist between capitalist states. If “left” and “right” are useful descriptors, they should be capable of describing those differences rather than collapsing every capitalist imperial power into the same category.