SOROS Attempts to Influence US Politics

George Soros speaks at an event on day three of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2020. (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg)

On a very warm day in late June 2019, I got onto the tram near the Budapest train station. I found a seat between people holding bouquets, beaming. We were all going to the Palace of Arts for Central European University’s last graduation in Budapest.


CEU was founded by George Soros in the early 1990s. It was meant to be both a place where students from the region could get a first-class education and, maybe more importantly, a counter to the nationalism that could have easily consumed Central and Eastern Europe after the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. It became a world-renowned institution of higher education. So, too, did it become a target of Viktor Orbán’s government, which passed a law that essentially forced most of CEU’s operations out of the city. From the beginning, it had been an improbable reality, attacked by politicians when convenient. But that, to those who loved it, just underscored its importance. On the one hand, Soros himself created something that would not have existed without his billions. On the other, all those billions were not enough to create conditions in which that something could persist.


I’ve thought of this often in the year that’s followed. I think of it, for example, when conspiracy theorists allege that Soros is the puppet master controlling protests against police brutality. It’s a ludicrous claim, one that strips agency from the individuals fighting for an end to systemic violence against black Americans. But it resonates in part because Soros has given money to, among other things, criminal justice reform. Here, too, there is a befuddling irony: Soros’s money has arguably led to real gains in the criminal justice space. And yet, if money was less concentrated, especially in the hands of men like Soros, perhaps people would not need to rely on billionaire philanthropists for change.

“That is a real conversation that has really erupted in a mainstream way … the question is, how do you give in ways that reduce the power of rich people?” Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” told me. “I do think he really has an opportunity here.”

Soros has, in his own way, thought about these issues, or at least about how to more equitably distribute wealth. Scrolling through my phone as I waited for the ceremony to begin back at the Palace of Arts, I noticed that Laura Silber, Open Society’s top communications official, had tweeted out a New York Times article. It was about an open letter published on the website Medium in which a collective of very rich individuals called for “a moderate wealth tax on the fortunes of the richest one-tenth of the richest 1 percent of Americans — on us.”

Signatories included Abigail Disney, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, and George Soros, whose photo the Times had selected to adorn the virtual page. “A Message from the Billionaire’s Club: Tax Us,” the headline read. Alexander Soros, the son who Soros has signaled is interested in carrying on his work, had signed on, too.  READ MORE...

What is an OPEN SOCIETY?

Liberals trying to articulate a vision of decent political order often invoke the concept of the “open society,” made famous by philosopher of science Karl Popper in his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, and later by the various incarnations of the Open Society Foundation of philanthropist George Soros, who was originally inspired by Popper’s work. Popper, trying to defend liberal democracy against the forces that he believed had led to Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism, distinguished open societies, in which human beings are capable of freely expressing their rational judgments about social conventions, from closed societies, in which such questioning is forbidden and uncritical obedience imposed. The division between closed and open societies is by these lights self-evident, and history is the record of human progress from closed to open in the face of periodic threats of catastrophic regression.


The outlines of Popper’s account remain part of many American liberals’ mental sketch of politics, even if they have never read The Open Society or heard of its author. Liberalism appears to its defenders as a regime founded on discussion and debate, in which free individuals participate without fear of censorship or undue moral pressure. Citizens in a liberal society are “open” to new ideas and to argument about them. They are, moreover, “open” to the influence of such ideas to reshape their lives; they are not committed to inflexible norms inherited from their tradition but are able, through their interactions with other open-minded interlocutors, to choose their own trajectories. Liberals neither receive from the past nor transmit to the future a commitment to maintain a specific set of truths, values and practices; all social and personal values are subject to ceaseless contestation and change. The open society and its members are thus open all at once to reason (as opposed to irrational prejudices binding them to convention), debate (as opposed to unspeaking conformity or the parroting of ideological scripts), and change (their personal and collective futures, which they will determine for themselves, being at present unknown).


Emphasizing rationality and human agency, however, may suggest that the open society forecloses humanity’s need for morality and religion. If society is essentially a debating club, in which individuals exchange and refine their opinions, how can the voices of either moral duty or of God be heard? As our traditions record them, these seem to speak to us not in a register of deliberation and mutual questioning but in sometimes terrifying imperatives. Illiberals of the right and left have thus long accused liberals of promoting freedom of speech, democratic deliberation, and skepticism about absolute truth as means of deafening themselves to the call of conscience. From such a moralizing perspective, the open society is open in the manner of a cloaca or a wound.


The tension between our desires for freedom and morality, however, was not unknown to the thinker who established the distinction between “open” and “closed” societies. He was not Karl Popper, but the French Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), in his last major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Bergson had spent most of his career offering bold restatements of our experiences of time, knowledge, and the permanence or transformations of objects and perceptions. In The Two Sources, however, he turned to politics. Rather than arguing, as Popper would, that the open and the closed are distinct forms of society, separated by the chasm between reason and unreason, he held that a rhythm of opening and closing is the heartbeat of every society, and every social institution and practice.


Society, Bergson insisted, begins “closed” and cannot survive without to a great extent remaining so. In this, he took inspiration from his former classmate Emile Durkheim, the founder of French sociology, who argued that society dominates and shapes its members to a degree many of his contemporary readers found horrifying to contemplate. Like Durkheim, Bergson argued that human beings are compelled to uphold social norms and fulfill our duties to each other, often in opposition to our own desires. We experience these compulsions, which constitute our moral sense, as coming at once from inside and outside us. In order to be effective, our feeling of duty must be automatic, compelling us to act without hesitation in predictable ways. It can be so only if the field of situations in which it would apply—that is, the whole of society—is itself stable, regular and relatively unchanging. A “closed society,” in Bergson’s view, both requires and generates a compulsory “closed morality” among its inhabitants. In a chilling comparison that he repeats throughout the book, he adds that a such a society and such a morality are as natural to human beings as an anthill is to ants.


The human anthill of the closed society, in which people are unconsciously compelled to follow social norms, is disturbed by the power of individual thought. In order to function, society requires individuals to cooperate, make sacrifices, and defend the collective against its enemies. Thinking, however, “counsels egoism.” It sets the thinker, who now becomes the judge of his own case, against the demands of others and of his own conscience.  READ MORE...