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.
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.
You’re attaching “left” and “right” to elements of a system, when you cannot. I’m making the point that elements can have near identical forms, but the nature of the system determines what class they ultimately benefit.
But again, that’s your definition of left and right, not an argument for why mine is invalid. You’re defining them exclusively by which class ultimately benefits from the system; I’m using them to describe political characteristics that can vary within a system. That’s the disagreement we’ve been having all along. You can’t objectively establish your conception as the correct one here, because there isn’t a single objectively correct conception to establish.
The reason your analysis is weaker is because it ultimately obfuscates reality more than it helps explain. Any attempt to categorize and sort something that detracts from our general knowledge, such as claiming unions built on imperialism are “left,” does more damage than it builds up our understanding. Beyond that, it’s a semantic argument.
But “it obfuscates reality” is the conclusion you keep asserting, not something you’ve demonstrated. Identifying one dimension of a system doesn’t prevent analysis of the others. Calling stronger organised labour relatively left-wing tells us something specific; we can then separately analyse how that labour movement relates to capitalism and imperialism.
At this point, calling my framework “weaker” because it doesn’t adopt yours is just circular.