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.
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.
I did demonstrate it. An example would be China and the US both having militaries, trying to call either “left” or “right” based on the form ignores the context. A kibbutz on Palestinian land is a settler-colonial project, it doesn’t matter that it is a communalist formation. You confuse the situation by abstracting forms out of their context.
As I said at the time, those examples demonstrate that context matters, which I’ve never disputed. They don’t demonstrate that characteristics can’t also be described independently. Saying a kibbutz has a communalist economic structure doesn’t erase its settler-colonial context. Both facts can be true and analytically useful simultaneously.
You’re treating acknowledging one as necessarily obscuring the other, and that’s the part you haven’t established.
Ultimately, you could have saved us both a lot of time by acknowledging that what you really mean is: “I don’t think Europe should be described in terms of leftism because its underlying capitalist and imperialist structure disqualifies it.” That’s an opinion, and a reasonable one, but not an objectively correct conception of left and right.
I’m saying labeling the form of something divorced from the rest of the system as “left” or “right” is an impossible task, as they depend on the context of the system.
But nobody is divorcing it from the system. Analysing a characteristic within its context and identifying its political orientation is entirely possible. You’re repeatedly equating distinguishing something analytically with pretending it’s independent, and those aren’t the same thing.