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.
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.
It sounds a lot like calling a fascist party National Socialist German Workers Party to obscure fascism, or calling yourself a Zionist, then screaming that pointing out actual fascist genocide, copied directly from Germans who directly copied slavers is “anti-Semitic,” against white Westerners, without a drop of Semitic blood in their veins.
Yea, the username is pretty apt.
I haven’t said they’re independent. Being able to distinguish and compare an element of a system doesn’t require pretending it exists independently of that system. If it did, you couldn’t meaningfully analyse individual policies or institutions at all?
You can compare, but when you declare individual elements of an overall system as “left” or “right,” you immediately throw the entire comparison into disarray. Comparison does not require labeling them as left or right. For example, a military in a socialist country like China and a military in a capitalist country like the US can be very similar in form, or even identical, yet they play a left or right role thanks to their overall systems.
But your example assumes what you’re trying to establish. You’re defining whether something is left or right entirely by the system it serves. That’s precisely the conception of left and right that we disagree on.
A redistributive policy doesn’t cease to be relatively left-wing simply because it operates within capitalism, any more than every policy within a socialist state automatically becomes left-wing.