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 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.
I never said there were not meaningful political differences, I said describing these differences as “more left” is a destruction of nuance by obfuscating what’s actually going on. Differences can exist without calling one “more left” or “more right.”
Then we agree that the differences are meaningful. I’m describing those differences using the conventional left-right spectrum. You’re arguing that doing so obscures their shared capitalist and imperialist structure. That’s a disagreement about the usefulness of the framework, not whether the comparison itself is accurate.
I never said there weren’t meaningful differences. My point is that describing the imperialist European powers as “more left” does more to damage our understanding than improve it, and therefore is not an accurate comparison. There can be differences in form that cannot be boiled down to “left and right.”
Sure, but I haven’t “boiled them down” to left and right. I’ve used left-right as one axis of comparison. Acknowledging that Europe is relatively further left on that axis doesn’t require ignoring imperialism, capitalism or any other dimension of the comparison.
It does, though, as you have to treat domestic policies dependent on imperialism as though they are independent from it. That’s like saying one landlord is more left than another landlord, such a comparison doesn’t make any actual sense.
Dependence doesn’t imply equivalence though? A domestic policy can be enabled by imperialism and still be meaningfully further left than another domestic policy. You’re arguing that its origin disqualifies the comparison, but I don’t see why that follows.
It feels like this comes from a concern that identifying any small part of our society as left-wing somehow means accepting it as sufficiently left-wing. But refusing to locate anything on that spectrum doesn’t help us understand or progress it either.