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 “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.
Calling a system more “left” based on analysis of individual parts of it on the basis of form, rather than the entire system, divorces them.
Why do you believe that?
Dont give another example with the premise baked in, put it into words.
Because forms do not exist without the context of the whole. Systems are not just the sum of individual parts, the actual interactions of the parts determine the overall nature of how the parts fit together.
That explains why context matters, but it still doesn’t explain why analysing or comparing a part necessarily divorces it from that context. I can consider both the form of a policy and how it functions within the wider system. Where’s the contradiction?