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 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.
I’m arguing that identifying policies dependent on imperialism as “left wing” makes about as much sense as calling a Kibbutz settlement on Palestinian land “left wing.” Left and right is not actually a spectrum in the traditional sense, and treating it as such obfuscates the reality of the situation.
That analogy doesn’t establish your point though. A kibbutz can have left-wing internal economic structures while simultaneously participating in an oppressive or colonial system. Calling those structures left-wing doesn’t require calling the settlement as a whole left-wing.
That’s exactly the distinction I’ve been making?
I understand the distinction you’re making. My point is that it entirely obfuscates the nature of left and right, rather than expanding our knowledge.
So this ultimately comes down to our different conceptions of what “left” and “right” describe. You treat them as classifications of the underlying system; I’m also using them as comparative descriptors of individual policies and institutions, but i don’t see how the latter inherently obfuscates the former.
You look at elements of a system as though they are independent from the system itself. There’s no such thing, however, as an element independent of the system it exists in.